MyGene.info: we need your support!

It has been almost a year since we released the v2 API of MyGene.info services last July. MyGene.info has grown from an internal service behind BioGPS to a robust, high-performance service provider for anybody to query for up-to-date gene annotation data. Currently, MyGene.info handles ~3 million requests every month, from ~5000 unique IPs. And we are confident that is just a small fraction of its current capacity.

We are currently preparing a grant proposal to continue the development of MyGene.info. There are many exciting new features we are planning to bring into the implementation. Here are a few big action items:

• MyVariant.info
  Yes, we are building MyGene.info equivalent for genetic variant annotations
• Community contributions
  We are building a framework to allow external users to contribute their annotation data
• JSON-LD addition
  For those who need semantic integration, JSON-LD will provide semantic contexts they would need. But for those who don’t care, don’t worry, you won’t even notice any difference, as JSON-LD will be completely hidden by default.

To make a software proposal successful, the voice from users is extremely critical. We previously had very encouraging experience with successfully funded BioGPS grants. So, if you are current or potential users for MyGene.info, please send us a letter of support, or even a message with a few words. Just tell us a little bit about yourself, share with us why you use MyGene.info, what impact it’s had on your research or what you’re particularly excited about in our plan moving forward. Email me directly at cwuscrippsedu, and feel free to contact me with any comments or questions. Your letters of support are essential for us to continue providing innovative tools for biomedical research. I look forward to hearing from you.

And the last, if you are regular users of our services, we encourage you to always pass an email parameter, so that we can better track the usage or follow up with you.
 

For those who are unfamiliar, MyGene.info provides simple-to-use REST web services to query/retrieve gene annotation data. It’s designed with simplicity and performance emphasized. When you make any query or display a gene-report page on BioGPS, BioGPS sends the request to MyGene.info web services for gene resolution. Just like BioGPS, developers can use this API in any web or desktop applications, or just in a quick analysis script. That way, they don’t have to worry about building and maintaining their own gene annotation databases.