Android Bioinformatics App Suggestions?

Question

[Cells Dividing]

I'm wanting to develop my first Android app in my spare time and am looking for any suggestions from the community for something people might find useful.

Post your app suggestions here!

(Please note I will be making the app free and would also be interested to hear from anyone wanting to jointly develop something with me).

[Biomonika (Noolean)]

Hi there. I might be interested to participate in developing - just let me know the details.

Answer 1

[Giovanni M Dall'Olio]

I think that anything that will make use of the touch screen to explore datasets will be great. One of the most common problems in bioinformatics is having to navigate huge genomic regions, multiple alignments, etc.., and this is much easier to do with a touchscreen than with a mouse.

So, a few suggestions:

• a simple interface to the UCSC browser to navigate genomic regions.
• a tool to edit multiple alignments using the touchscreen. You can take inspiration from jalview, seaview and the others.

Take into account that I am not sure if there are already existing applications for doing these tasks. You should make a search first.

[Cells Dividing]

Thanks for the reply.

An interface to UCSC might be a bit ambitious for my first app! (and as far as I know there's no public API/webservice to access the track data). I know that JBrowse is very useable with a touch interface so there might not be a point in me reinventing the wheel for that.

Your multiple alignment idea sounds good - I'll have a think about it.

Here are a few other ideas I've had:

• Something useful for the "web lab" people so that they can use the app on the bench instead of a piece of paper and calculator i.e. calculating concentrations or some other routine task they commonly do? (I'm not a wet lab person myself so don't know what is a common task for them)
• Pubmed interface/search
• NCBI access - download/lookup sequences, genes etc then do something with it - i.e. BLAST

If anyone has any comments/can develop any ideas further then I'd love to have their input...

Answer 2

[Istvan Albert]

Some sort of sample information tracking with entry/management on the phone.

Fundamentally the problem is that each lab has its own protocols and methods - this often makes using a big LIMS unwieldy. What would be great is a system that would allow people to design the fields for each protocol then save/exchange records easily via a centralized server.

This should be done while teamed up with a larger lab not just on your own and while continuously evaluating how it works in practice.

[m.umer.f1]

I have an idea. I'm thinking to design operating system for bioinformatics in mobile phone. We can do this by using Android. As we know, Android is open source and running under linux kernel. So I think we can design biological OS for cell phone. We already have biojava libraries. We can use them according to our requirement.

I have some other ideas like this. We can design Android ECG machines and Android ultrasound machines etc. but for this we have to do some hardware level changes.

I need a team. Please contact me if anyone is interested.

• [e-mail]
• skype id: m.umer.f1

[Biomonika (Noolean)]

Check online - there are already some bioinformatics apps for android, e.g. for sequence alignment and bench width measurement.