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Integrating gene ontology DB's into pipeline scripts

Does anybody have suggestions for integrating gene ontology DBs or BLAST/refseq into bioinformatics pipelines? My goal was to be able to automatically search my output (filtered by impact refseq transcript ID's and/or HUGO gene IDs) against a gene ontology DB such as DAVID or Refseq, then automatically fetch the results to display in a clinical report. I was thinking of maybe building a web scraping script since there doesn't seem to be much support for this sort of workflow API wise.

david pipelines go

why scraping as all those databases are available for download ?

2 answers

Have a look at GeneSCF. It is easy to integrate in any bioinformatics pipelines.

Looks good, thanks for the tip!

There should be no need to scrape websites; there are a large number of tools that implement various ontology and functional annotation-related functionalities.

Most are written in R. I would investigate those.

FWIW even DAVID has a web API:

I tried the DAVID api but the output isnt very detailed, I'm not looking for simple gene annotation, I already have that with snpEff and other tools, I was looking to write a script that takes my list of annotated genes, queries the DB for deep ontological info, and generates an in depth report based on it. some thing like the example below, I know blast has rBlast, but it does it provide deep detail?

High Impact Variant Results: NM_123: High impact, associated with X disease etc.. NM_456: High Impact associated with Y disease, seen in Z populations etc

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