The Hematopoietic Expression Viewer: expanding mobile apps as a scientific tool

Abstract

Summary: Many important data in current biological science comprise hundreds, thousands or more individual results. These massive data require computational tools to navigate results and effectively interact with the content. Mobile device apps are an increasingly important tool in the everyday lives of scientists and non-scientists alike. These software present individuals with compact and efficient tools to interact with complex data at meetings or other locations remote from their main computing environment. We believe that apps will be important tools for biologists, geneticists and physicians to review content while participating in biomedical research or practicing medicine. We have developed a prototype app for displaying gene expression data using the iOS platform. To present the software engineering requirements, we review the model-view-controller schema for Apple's iOS. We apply this schema to a simple app for querying locally developed microarray gene expression data. The challenge of this application is to balance between storing content locally within the app versus obtaining it dynamically via a network connection. Availability: The Hematopoietic Expression Viewer is available at http://www.shawlab.org/he_viewer. The source code for this project and any future information on how to obtain the app can be accessed at http://www.shawlab.org/he_viewer.

GeneStoryTeller: a mobile app for quick and comprehensive information retrieval of human genes

“…In the new Era, smartphones’ and tablets’ (Android or Apple’s mobile operating system iOS) supporters are increasing in number day by day, since the combination of having lower mobility limitations with high performance devices is more feasible. However, despite the “blast” of mobile Apps, only few of them have been developed and proposed to the research community in the field of bioinformatics, namely the Hematopoietic Expression Viewer ( 1 ), YASARA View ( 2 ), DNAApp ( 3 ) and RCSB PDB Mobile ( 4 ). An application dedicated to search genes with primary information from the National Center for Biotechnology (NCBI) ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene ) is performed by the BioGene App ( http://cbio.mskcc.org/tools/handheld-devices/index.html ) supported by the Computational Biology Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.…”

RCSB PDB Mobile : iOS and Android mobile apps to provide data access and visualization to the RCSB Protein Data Bank

“…The CPU speed, memory resources and graphics display capabilities of these devices have become increasingly powerful and sophisticated and can support advanced applications whether at work, home or on the go. An early example of such an app is the Hematopoietic Expression Viewer ( James et al , 2012 ), which provides access to microarray gene expression data.…”

Exploring spatial patterns of gene expression from Fruit Fly embryogenesis on the iPhone

“…Applications developed for mobile devices serve as a new window to disseminate existing data, and they represent an alternative to traditional software technology. Mobile applications compel developers to focus on specific data cross-sections, which simplifies data and user navigation for even non-experts (e.g., Kumar and Hedges, 2011;James et al, 2012). One may argue that the use of personal devices to deliver scientific knowledge to experts and non-experts is the next frontier to disseminate information in this age of digital biology.…”