Bioinformatics

In response to Titus' post on using imagemaps for genomic visualization: Why are imagemaps so popular in genomics? As an extreme and unfair comparison, just imagine if http://maps.google.com was an image map. Given a CGI script that can accept a url like &start=1024&stop=2048&chr=3 and return an appropriate image, you can provide a substantial set of tools using openlayers , which is developed by what must be one of the largest and active developer communities in GIS. (Yes, I am an openlayers fan-boy.) You can do that with a small addition to openlayers which I updated a couple weeks ago to OL version 2.6. In that update, I removed > 140 lines of code . So, it's now even less of a change to OL. Maybe when 2.7 comes out, I'll figure out how to provide a patch that allows an extra argument to the OpenLayers.Map constructor that limits panning to the horizontal direction -- in which case genome-browser will cease to exist and only the single file containing ...

I've copied this recipe that I modified before, and added the BK Tree structure in cython. It's in my repo here . Check it out with: svn checkout http://bpbio.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/seqfind or easy_install with sudo easy_install http://bpbio.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/seqfind It's now using the Damerau-Levenshtein distance which is more sensible for bioinformatics where transpositions are frequent. Bearophile's original implementation used a tuple, which made sense, but in Cython, it's more efficient to use an object where the properties can be typed--as a class is converted to a c-struct--so there is no conversion when appending to a python array -- if i understand the generated c code correctly. Using an object also allows arbitrary info to be passed along with the word when creating the tree, again, this is important for bio-informatics when the string is something like "actgcc ... acgtc" and it's useful to attach some annotation to it like: word...