A couple of key R packages in this space: ggmap and gganimate. To illustrate, I’ve used data from the recent New Zealand earthquake to generate some static maps and an animation. Here’s the Github repository and a report. Thanks to Florian Teschner for a great ggmap tutorial which got me started.
My own work in bioinformatics to date has not (sadly!) required much analysis of geospatial data but I can see use cases in many areas – environmental microbiology, for example.
I’m a big fan of leaflet for making interactive maps from R. I made a leaflet version of your NZ earthquake map. See it at http://rpubs.com/kent37/nz_earthquake. Code in a pull request for your Github repo.