Genomics and Silverlight from Microsoft working together for Great Visual Enhancement– BioMashUps

Hard Hat Area: The University is soon to post on CodePlex, the open source community page from Microsoft. What is amazing to me is the fact that the Popfly platform was used for Silvermap, so now we have bio-mashups too. The processing of images can now take place at the desktop instead of the server level and this speeds up the process tremendously instead of having to wait. The amount of information to be read and deciphered is huge and this brings the desired information into a form where it can be digested and utilized quickly.

BioMashups are defined here:

Biomashups and Mashup Frameworks

“An alternative approach to bioinformatics analysis is to make use of web mashups. Mashups rapidly combine data and services from multiple sources within a single web based application. Mashups therefore offer a means for the integration of various bioinformatics tools, allowing a specific task to be performed efficiently. Although mashups can be ad hoc, limited in scope and eminently disposable, if properly developed, the model can handle more substantial computational experiments and support a culture of sharing and re-use.”

In the Pop Fly example a student looks for the protein coding nucleotide sequence, and is asked to determine the gene family and to perform a search to obtain more information about the gene.

This is wild and dynamic and certainly a help for those in research and development with genomics. I have written several times about the Common User Interface, a CodePlex open source software available for free for any medical records software vendor and you can view more information here. The Common User Interface uses the dynamics of Silverlight, like you see on Netflix and on the Presidential Inauguration, for health care charting with the hope that someday interest will prevail here with vendors coming to some sort of unified interface so the screens are the same or similar for the clinical staff at every hospital or doctor’s office.

Common User Interface – Update and walk through video

EHRs need Standard Templates – So Let’s Look at the Common User Interface Project, a lot of the work is already in progress and partially completed

Personalized medicine will rely on IT – It’s all about Software

There’s also this story from Vanderbilt on how they are using Silverlight for early and immediate detection of Sepsis, a good read. BD

Silverlight tools that help researchers make sense of complex genome data and patterns are being included in the advanced bioinformatics syllabus at the Queensland University of Technology. Genomic research is coming to the forefront, especially with clinical trials so this seems like somewhat of a natural to combine both technologies in the process, plus again, the dynamics and ability to drill down and see information immediately in this format is great.

The tools have been developed out of the Microsoft QUT eResearch Centre, a $2.7 million joint venture funded by Microsoft Research and the Queensland State Government.
One of the tools, Silvergene, is a genomic visualizes designed to replace existing genome browsers.

By using Microsoft Silverlight - a rich browser plug-in - Hogan said QUT had been able to enable the image processing to occur at the desktop level rather than the server.
"We can generate using Silverlight on-the-fly at the desktop," Hogan said.

Hogan said the Centre has also developed an application that brings map navigation to genomics called Silvermap, and a set of bioinformatics analysis ‘blocks' based on Microsoft's Popfly technology.