Step-by-step instructions to viewing your own data
Get started viewing your own data:
We support tab-delimited (.tsv and .txt) and Microsoft Excel files (.xlsx and .xls). Data on a Local Xena Hub can only be viewed or accessed by the same computer on which it is running, keeping private data secure.
The Local Xena Hub must be installed and running in order to load data, as well as any time you want to view data. The Local Xena Hub will remember previously loaded data.
Please use Chrome to view your own data.
Double click on the download to begin the installation of the Xena Hub. Follow the wizard to finish the install.
Mac: OSX 10.7 and above
Windows: 64-bit
Linux: ability to run a .jar file
When you loaded your genomic data we asked what type of genes, transcripts or probes you used. If you selected one of the options from the drop down menu then you can enter HUGO gene names or the identifiers in your file. If you did not select one of the options then you will need to enter the identifiers as they appear in your file.
Xena does not utilize a central rendering service, or require hubs to be publicly accessible on the internet like, for example, the UCSC Genome Browser does. Data flows in one direction, from hubs to the user agent. If the user installs a Xena Hub on their laptop, the hub is as secure as the laptop. If the user installs a Xena Hub on a local network, behind a firewall, the hub is as secure as the local network.
The Xena Browser accesses data from a local Xena Hub on the same computer by requesting data from http://127.0.0.1. The local Xena Hub will make the data within it available at this address. The local Xena Hub will only answer requests made form the user's own computer.
Users will need to use a web browser that supports this if they wish to use a Xena Hub on the loopback interface. At the time of writing, this includes Chrome, and Firefox, but not Safari.
A very limited set of metadata is considered to be not secure in the Xena architecture model. This includes cohort names and samples names. This metadata is visible to other hubs in the following scenarios. When the user selects a cohort, all hubs are queried for samples on that cohort. When the user selects a data field, the hub holding that field is queried with the field ID (e.g. gene, probe, transcript, phenotype) and all cohort sample IDs. This means, for example, that two hubs holding data on the same cohort will see the union of sample IDs from that cohort. While data queries are not made available publicly, a malicious person could gain entry to a Xena Hub and comb through logs for these queries. For these reasons, these metadata fields should not contain private information.