Extension Possibilities
Below is a list of extensions to the pilot project that have been thought of and might be worth carrying out. Please provide feedback showing your opinions of these suggestions.
Short Term
- Some of the lists are quite long (e.g. the list showing all the genes that may show a certain phenotype... it might be worthwhile allowing the user an extra search on these sorts of pages to narrow down their search results based on two criteria. I don’t however see the immediate practical benefits drawn from this addition because if the user were looking for, say, a specific gene then he would have just searched for that gene in the first place.
- At the moment, a user can download all the data for one experiment... should there be other sub-groupings of data that a user might find it useful to download?
- Write a script that goes through the gene table and finds the ENSG ids for each of the HGNC symbols and fills in the ENSG column.
- Write special search options for entities beginning with ENST and ENSG to speed up lookups done when linked into from Ensembl.
Long Term
- Write functions on the Gene and Target models which query the Bio mart database and return the related gene or transcript entities. With the reagent sequences available, this will allow an automatic mapping between existing reagents and targets to be found.
- Find a good way to download all the data from one server to another (possibly using aspera). This is so if the database is moved to another system, the data can be transferred with it.
- Work on more visually pleasing ways to display images and movies (embedding) as well as displaying the data associated with each.
