Company
Date Published
Author
MyGene.info Development Team
Word count
936
Language
-
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The MyGene.info Development Team at the Scripps Research Institute has developed MyGene.info and MyVariant.info, utilizing Elasticsearch to streamline the fragmented landscape of gene and variant data, allowing researchers to efficiently access up-to-date genetic information in a consistent JSON format. Spearheaded by Dr. Chunlei Wu, these services aggregate data from millions of genes and variants across numerous databases, addressing the challenges of scalability and performance in bioinformatics research. By employing Elasticsearch, the team ensures that users can perform flexible, high-speed searches specific to their needs, such as filtering variant annotations or gene data. The services, which are free for public use but may have data source-specific restrictions, have proven capable of handling high traffic, with MyGene.info alone managing over 10,000 requests per minute from thousands of unique monthly users. The visualization of service usage is facilitated by Kibana, helping the team distinguish traffic sources and manage client requests. The development of these tools, part of Dr. Andrew Su's computational biology lab, aims to make genetic information more accessible and useful to the research community, with plans to expand the scope to cover other areas with fragmented data sources.