Adding some SPICE to DAS

The distributed annotation system (DAS) defines a communication protocol used to exchange biological annotations. It is motivated by the idea that annotations should not be provided by single centralized databases but instead be spread over multiple sites. Data distribution, performed by DAS servers, is separated from visualization, which is carried out by DAS clients. The original DAS protocol was designed to serve annotation of genomic sequences. We have extended the protocol to be applicable to macromolecular structures. Here we present SPICE, a new DAS client that can be used to visualize protein sequence and structure annotations. AVAILABILITY: http://www.efamily.org.uk/software/dasclients/spice/     

MyDas,an Extensible Java DAS Server

A large number of diverse, complex, and distributed data resources are currently available in the Bioinformatics domain. The pace of discovery and the diversity of information means that centralised reference databases like UniProt and Ensembl cannot integrate all potentially relevant information sources. From a user perspective however, centralised access to all relevant information concerning a specific query is essential. The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) defines a communication protocol to exchange annotations on genomic and protein sequences; this standardisation enables clients to retrieve data from a myriad of sources, thus offering centralised access to end-users.We introduce MyDas, a web server that facilitates the publishing of biological annotations according to the DAS specification. It deals with the common functionality requirements of making data available, while also providing an extension mechanism in order to implement the specifics of data store interaction. MyDas allows the user to define where the required information is located along with its structure, and is then responsible for the communication protocol details.     

easyDAS: Automatic creation of DAS servers

Background  

The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) has proven to be a successful way to publish and share biological data. Although there are more than 750 active registered servers from around 50 organizations, setting up a DAS server comprises a fair amount of work, making it difficult for many research groups to share their biological annotations. Given the clear advantage that the generalized sharing of relevant biological data is for the research community it would be desirable to facilitate the sharing process.     

Integrating sequence and structural biology with DAS

Background  

The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) is a network protocol for exchanging biological data. It is frequently used to share annotations of genomes and protein sequence.     

Dasty3, a WEB framework for DAS

MOTIVATION: Dasty3 is a highly interactive and extensible Web-based framework. It provides a rich Application Programming Interface upon which it is possible to develop specialized clients capable of retrieving information from DAS sources as well as from data providers not using the DAS protocol. Dasty3 provides significant improvements on previous Web-based frameworks and is implemented using the 1.6 DAS specification. AVAILABILITY: Dasty3 is an open-source tool freely available at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/dasty/ under the terms of the GNU General public license. Source and documentation can be found at http://code.google.com/p/dasty/. CONTACT: hhe@ebi.ac.uk.     

Dasty2, an Ajax protein DAS client

SUMMARY: Dasty2 is a highly interactive web client integrating protein sequence annotations from currently more than 40 sources, using the distributed annotation system (DAS). AVAILABILITY: Dasty2 is an open source tool freely available under the terms of the Apache License 2.0, publicly available at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/dasty/.     

ProServer: a simple, extensible Perl DAS server

SUMMARY: The increasing size and complexity of biological databases has led to a growing trend to federate rather than duplicate them. In order to share data between federated databases, protocols for the exchange mechanism must be developed. One such data exchange protocol that is widely used is the Distributed Annotation System (DAS). For example, DAS has enabled small experimental groups to integrate their data into the Ensembl genome browser. We have developed ProServer, a simple, lightweight, Perl-based DAS server that does not depend on a separate HTTP server. The ProServer package is easily extensible, allowing data to be served from almost any underlying data model. Recent additions to the DAS protocol have enabled both structure and alignment (sequence and structural) data to be exchanged. ProServer allows both of these data types to be served. AVAILABILITY: ProServer can be downloaded from http://www.sanger.ac.uk/proserver/ or CPAN http://search.cpan.org/~rpettett/. Details on the system requirements and installation of ProServer can be found at http://www.sanger.ac.uk/proserver/.     

DASMiner: discovering and integrating data from DAS sources

Background  

DAS is a widely adopted protocol for providing syntactic interoperability among biological databases. The popularity of DAS is due to a simplified and elegant mechanism for data exchange that consists of sources exposing their RESTful interfaces for data access. As a growing number of DAS services are available for molecular biology resources, there is an incentive to explore this protocol in order to advance data discovery and integration among these resources.     

Integrating T-cell epitope annotations with sequence and structural information using DAS

Immunoinformatics is an emerging new field that benefits from computational analyses and tools that facilitate the understanding of the immune system. A large number of immunoinformatics resources such as immune-related databases and analysis software are available through the World Wide Web for the benefit of the research community. However, immunoinformatics developments have sometimes remained isolated from mainstream bioinformatics. Therefore, there is clearly a need for integration, which will empower the exchange of data and annotations within the scientific community in a quick and efficient fashion. Here, we have chosen the Distributed Annotation System (DAS), for integrating in house annotations on experimental and predicted HLA I-restriction elements of CD8 T-cell epitopes with sequence and structural information.     

GenExp: an interactive web-based genomic DAS client with client-side data rendering

Background

The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) offers a standard protocol for sharing and integrating annotations on biological sequences. There are more than 1000 DAS sources available and the number is steadily increasing. Clients are an essential part of the DAS system and integrate data from several independent sources in order to create a useful representation to the user. While web-based DAS clients exist, most of them do not have direct interaction capabilities such as dragging and zooming with the mouse.

Results

Here we present GenExp, a web based and fully interactive visual DAS client. GenExp is a genome oriented DAS client capable of creating informative representations of genomic data zooming out from base level to complete chromosomes. It proposes a novel approach to genomic data rendering and uses the latest HTML5 web technologies to create the data representation inside the client browser. Thanks to client-side rendering most position changes do not need a network request to the server and so responses to zooming and panning are almost immediate. In GenExp it is possible to explore the genome intuitively moving it with the mouse just like geographical map applications. Additionally, in GenExp it is possible to have more than one data viewer at the same time and to save the current state of the application to revisit it later on.

Conclusions

GenExp is a new interactive web-based client for DAS and addresses some of the short-comings of the existing clients. It uses client-side data rendering techniques resulting in easier genome browsing and exploration. GenExp is open source under the GPL license and it is freely available at http://gralggen.lsi.upc.edu/recerca/genexp.     

Dasty and UniProt DAS: a perfect pair for protein feature visualization

In this study, we present two freely available and complementary Distributed Annotation System (DAS) resources: a DAS reference server that provides up-to-date sequence and annotation from UniProt, with additional feature links and database cross-references from InterPro and a DAS client implemented using Java and Macromedia Flash that is optimized for the display of protein features.