Google Maps meets GBrowse

(via Yakafokon and Ian Holmes)

I have a soft spot for genome visualisations. This has been a good week for that sort of thing: Pierre over at Yakafokon has produced an open source PHP script that renders UCSC tracks as SVG - which works nicely in Firefox - and over at the Holmes lab they've got a swish AJAXified genome browser up and running (again, in Firefox).

It looks like the latter is a long term project - it'll be interesting to see how it develops. Frankly, it's pretty cool now, and at the moment it's just a prototype.

Also visualisation related is a new paper in Bioinformatics by Leighton Pritchard from the Scottish Crop Research Institute, which describes a Bio::Graphics style package for BioPython. I don't use BioPython, so I can't say much more about it other than to note that the graphics in the user manual certainly look nice.

Finally: on a different, yet somewhat related note (I only noticed because of Pierre's post) - UCSC has a MySQL database for public access now. That was always the edge that Ensembl had over UCSC, in my book: you didn't need to parse any text files to retrieve lots of genes at once or to cross reference multiple annotations.