Drupal and other Content Managment Systems (CMSes) are extremely flexible and powerful frameworks for building sophisticated data mashup web appications for use in genomics research. One such data mashup app that I and my colleagues have developed is gClusters, which was designed specifically for transcriptional genomics, in particular "DNA transcription code" analysis.

I was at a GMOD meeting (Generic Model Organism Database) in San Diego the week when the earthquake hit, giving a talk called: Using Drupal and Flex to build custom user-configurable interfaces for transcriptional genomics research"

The next week we were using Drupal to build data mashup apps to aid Haiti like this: Haiti need-have data mashup

For a quick look at a genomics data mashup for the neural-precursor specific gene, neuralized , look here: neur_gene_data_mashup. Click once on the image to make it move out of the way, so that you can see the full mashup.

Take Home: This genomics data mashup example - explained further here: more about gClusters - is intended to show that, with the proper team and support, we can build almost any desired web informatics tool, whether for genomics research, or for managing complex information resources - such as the Twitter streams with millions of messages, that have been sent over the last two weeks about the crisis in Haiti.

After reading the introduction on the demo page, click on the various tabs at the top, such as early neural genes. This will show a set of prioritized results, in which the genes have been prioritized and ordered at the top.