What You’re Doing Is Rather Desperate

Notes from the life of a bioinformatics researcher

Evolution of an idea

It’s great to sit back and watch ideas and software unfold.

Just over a year ago, Euan asked whether anyone was employing AJAX in graphical genome browsers. The old-style “reload on refresh” browsers (UCSC, Gbrowse, Ensembl) were starting to look a bit Web 1.0.

This sparked plenty of discussion, including a pointer to X:Map: a very nice alternative view of Ensembl data using the Google Maps API (update: and of course ajax-ification of Gbrowse).

Jump forward to today and thanks to Euan’s del.icio.us feed via FriendFeed, I discover Genome Projector, which takes the zoom-able Google Maps idea to a new level.

And that’s how social networks let you discover stuff. Brilliant.

Written by nsaunders

March 12, 2008 at 10:07 pm

Posted in bioinformatics, computing, genomics, google, web resources

Tagged with , ,

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6 Responses

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  1. … and I found it on Postgenomic in a post by Ricardo Vidal who I think got it from Sandra.

    Euan

    March 13, 2008 at 1:08 am

  2. um, we have been working on ajaxifying GBrowse for some time now… our first attempt (which basically uses the Google Maps pre-rendered-tiles approach) has been posted here for a year or more:

    http://genome.biowiki.org/

    Version 2.0 includes much more code clientside (so that you can overlay dynamically javascript-generated features on top of pre-rendered tiles) as well as wiki-type features.

    anyway, my point is, we’ve been doing this for a while, and (what’s more) we’re specifically funded to keep working on it! so, don’t forget about us ;)

    Ian Holmes

    March 13, 2008 at 3:55 am

  3. Good to hear Ian, thanks for the update.

    nsaunders

    March 13, 2008 at 9:36 am

  4. Wow, that’s really nice :-) Good find!

    Tim Yates

    March 13, 2008 at 11:48 pm

  5. Spectacular tool! Thanks for helping raise awareness of this valuable resource within the bioinformatics community. Congratulations to the developers for their hard work assembling this data into such a useful format.

    Larry Helseth

    March 14, 2008 at 5:56 am

  6. You know, having trialled the service, I have to agree with one of the comments over at Sandra’s blog: it looks pretty, but there’s far less information than other genome browsers and you can’t zoom to sequence level. The first issue is perhaps one of inadequate annotation.

    Still, I do like the visualisation aspect and hopefully “the rest will follow”.

    nsaunders

    March 14, 2008 at 3:32 pm


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