BioContainers Registry: searching bioinformatics and proteomics tools, packages, and containers

BioContainers is an open-source project that aims to create, store, and distribute bioinformatics software containers and packages. The BioContainers community has developed a set of guidelines to standardize the software containers including the metadata, versions, licenses, and/or software dependencies. BioContainers supports multiple packaging and container technologies such as Conda, Docker, and Singularity. The BioContainers provide over 9000 bioinformatics tools including more than 200 proteomics and mass spectrometry tools. Here, we introduce the BioContainers Registry and Restful API to make containerized bioinformatics tools more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). The BioContainers Registry provides a fast and convenient way to find and retrieve bioinformatics tools packages and containers. By doing so, it will increase the use of bioinformatics packages and containers while promoting replicability and reproducibility in research.