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Abstract
Cancer mutations involves various biological factors and cellular mechanisms involving genes, miRNAs, transcription factors (TFs), chemicals etc. Hence, understanding the activity and role of all of these factors can be exploited for therapeutics. To aid this, iMir, a web portal with multi-tabbed design, analysis and user-guide has been developed to search, analyze and visualize the miRNA-disease, miRNA-TF-gene, miRNA-drug associations. Agile methodology was adopted for the software development of this tool. Weekly requirements and goals were discussed, drafted and accomplished and subject to review, testing and documentation. Code integrated upon approval. iMir has been developed using MySQL as a database and the front-end using HTML, PHP, JavaScript, CSS and AJAX. D3.js and Google visualization libraries were used for presentation. The team was able to complete the core functional requirements of the tool successfully. iMir allows users to enter miRNAs, chemical, TFs, genes and diseases and extract their underlying relationships. The tabular representation details the associations and the corresponding PubMed IDs for additional reference. During the software development, the issue of presenting large data of queried results into tabular and graph format comprehensively posed a challenge, which was resolved. However, dynamic updating of the visual graph display in correspondence to the changes in the tabular data, remains a challenging issue. iMir is a one-stop web portal for biologists and drug researchers to study the biological factors responsible for disease regulation in cells via miRNA, genes, and drugs. It allows researchers to investigate and test their hypotheses for determining disease prognosis and therapeutics.
Publication Date
2016
Keywords
Computer engineering, bioinformatics, miRNAs, diseases, data visualization
Disciplines
Computer Engineering | Engineering
Faculty Advisor/Mentor
Dr. Preetam Ghosh
VCU Capstone Design Expo Posters
Rights
© The Author(s)
Date of Submission
August 2016