Persephone is available as a web application at https://web.persephonesoft.com
It is fully functional and free to use. Our portal hosts many popular genomes (about 450 genomes total). Please let us know if you don’t find your favorite organism in the list.
You can add your data, which will be seamlessly integrated with the data from our system. Please note that your datasets will be visible only to you. Users who want to add the data must register with an email address (or OpenID, such as Google or Microsoft). We give each user 5 GB of disk space by default. The large BAM/CRAM files can be accessed remotely via a URL without needing to be loaded into the system. This way, only the small index file will be transferred and stored on disk, thereby not consuming too much of the disk quota.
The full list of Persephone’s features is available here.
It might be that the functionality of our portal is enough for you to perform your research. If so, please continue using it and provide us with your feedback.
At the same time, you will need a license if you decide to host Persephone on your own hardware and serve your proprietary data within your organization. Your personal installation will enable you to utilize the power of the PersephoneShell loading tool. The command-line application can run multiple tasks that analyze and load the data. Besides straightforward functions, such as loading genomic sequences or annotations, some commands create marker tracks by cutting small sequence tags from a given genome and mapping them onto other genomes. Such tracks are automatically linked by common markers and help align the maps. Another way to align the maps is based on orthologous gene pairs, which can be easily calculated by running another command in PersephoneShell. Other advantages of running your personal instance include adding custom hyperlinks to different object properties, thereby providing ways to integrate Persephone with other resources.
Please let us know if you decide to host Persephone “in-house”.