BasalCell: A project scaffold generator for bioinformatics analysis

In the current bioinformatics landscape, where R-centric and Python-centric ecosystems coexist and overlap, there is an increasing demand for the organic integration of these disparate development environments. As bioinformatics practices become ubiquitous, it is crucial to lower the technical barriers for biologists to adopt software engineering standards, such as version control, environment reproducibility, code readability, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), and comprehensive documentation, which often present significant implementation hurdles for biologists with limited programming experience. To address these challenges, we developed BasalCell (https://github.com/yo-aka-gene/BasalCell), a project scaffolding system designed to provide a standardized, easily reproducible template that integrates these essential features by default, enabling researchers to seamlessly manage multi-language environments and automate rigorous development workflows, ultimately fostering greater transparency and reliability in biological data science.