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1.9 Wrapping up

Congratulations on completing Part 1 of the Nextflow for the Life Sciences workshop!

Throughout each lesson, you've built up a fully functional, and flexible Nextflow workflow from scratch. Along the way, you've gained practical experience with the key concepts and syntax that form the backbone of Nextflow pipelines.

1.9.1 Key takeaways

  • Nextflow lets you to chain together data processing steps that allow you to make complex bioinformatics workflows
  • Nextflow workflows are built from small units (processes) that communicate via channels
  • A variety of execution logs and outputs lets you troubleshoot your workflows
  • Work and task directories are uniquely identified to enable resumability and checkpointing
  • Channels are a powerful feature that lets you structure your workflows and provides the ability to run multiple tasks in parallel
  • Using parameters can make your pipeline flexible and configurable upon runtime - no more hardcoding and editing your files everytime new data or samples are run

1.9.2 What's next?

In Part 1 we developed a simple "Hello World!" example to introduce the key Nextflow concepts required to build more complex, real-world bioinformatics workflows.

Part 2 will continue by taking the concepts and examples introduced here and apply them to develop a simple RNAseq processing pipeline.