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

In this "Haiti need-have data mashup" we created a web interface that provided a "data mashup" between two types of Twitter messages that were very active during the period after the earthquake: there were people who were tweeting for food and other resources that were urgently needed in Haiti, using the "#haiti #need" hash-tags to mark their messages, so that people could search for them. There also were people who were tweeting about having such resource available, using the "#hait #have" hash-tags to mark their messages. Our web site data mashup brought those two Twitter search results together in one "mashup", or "web portal", and also saved all of the messages in a database so that they could be searched, sorted, etc. by people trying to link people with needs, with people who could answer those needs. This allowed us to identify many large groups of people in camps who urgently needed food, which we could report to the World Food Program, which controlled the food distribution in Haiti.

Here is an example of a genomics data mashup for the neural-precursor specific gene, neuralized: neur_gene_data_mashup. This mashup provides an integrated view three kinds of data: graphical, computational, and genetic information about the gene "neuralized" (neur). Each of these types of information come from different data sources on the web. The computational analysis reveals clusters of DNA-binding sites present in the genome. (These are revealed by "regular expression" analysis.) These clusters are potential regulatory elements - "promoters" or "enhancers" - for controlling the neural-specific gene expression of genes such as neuralized. If you would like to know more about the gClusters genomics app, and DNA Transcription Code analysis, you can find it here: more about gClusters

Take Home: This genomics data mashup example 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 were sent during the first two weeks after the earthquake in Haiti.