My Web services/portals
A note on my attempts to organize and manage knowledge environments in life sciences...
All of us know the pervading nature of search engines on the internet and other technologies that have mushroomed from this. I have been a fan of free codes provided by Google (who isnt!!!!) and have used this to create some custom search engines. It started of by creating a Google API where one can input biological sequence data (DNA, RNA and Protein) and search the entire world wide web. This engine is called Instaseq and recieves many visitors from around the world. This prompted me to play around more with custom search engines and I developed some useful sites. Please feel free to use them...
- Webseq - This is Google CSE curated to gather information from all major public databases, products of Biotech companies, Grants from funding institutions, even jobs and careers. The user has to feed in search keywords and the results are classified from all these portals.
- g-nomics - This is a specialized version of job search engine for research scientists with search results gathered from major science jobs portals. Another specialized version of this engine returns job search-results from all of craigslist (only biotech/science related). Results are classified from major cities.
- Cancer research - Gene, drug, mutations... - A Search engine mine for established mutations, drugs, treatments and clinical trials in regard to all forms of cancers.
However, Sequerome represents my seed attempt to present a seamless interface to work with biological sequence data and connect to third party sequence analysis tools/servers. Though there exist tools like these, it is the concept around which it is designed, that makes it unique and special. Since its inception, it has a daily visitorship from around the world and is linked to major Bioinformatics portals.
Since then, I have gone further to lead the creation of a full fledged bioinformatics web portal called Sequilab. This portal, in my knowledge, is the first and the only sequence analysis portal in the world that actually 'integrates' third party web based sequence analysis services/tools into one seamless interface. What is unique about about this is that the results from a sequence alignment report carried out using NCBI-BLAST are linked to all these analysis tools. For example you can choose a 13th record in the report and digest it with all the known restriction enzymes. In this, you can design primers, siRNA, Vectors, carry out epitope analysis for antibody generation and much more. All the work can be saved into your 'My Saved Projects' and retrieved for later use. As a researcher, you can create your own profile that best highlights your research accomplishments and then share it with your peers and colleagues. Best of all, you can also network with members in 'communities' forum. You have to visit this portal to actually experience this. Again, this service has been visited and accessed by researchers from all over the world. Its the latest in the vibrantly growing community of researchers who can actually 'collaborate' with each other in one platform. Again, I have kept the services completely FREE.
The world of Bioinformatics is flooded with countless number of web based services that provide nifty little 'gadgets', 'tools' and 'repositories'. Allied fields like 'Biomedical informatics' and 'Health Informatics' are not far behind. Through 'Sequilab', my aim is to provide one common platform for all research professionals in life sciences, and aid them in making greater disocveries.