Using Web Services as part of the 2D gel analysis workflow
Nataliya Sklyar1, Matthias Berth 2, Dirk Lewerentz
1sklyar@informatik.uni-leipzig.de, University of Leipzig; 2berth@decodon.com , DECODON GmbH
The use of web services in Delta2D (http://www.decodon.com), an end-user 2D gel analysis application, is presented. Software for spot identification, quantification and spot matching is widely used in 2D electrophoresis gel analysis. Annotations of protein functions, physicochemical properties or sequences are needed to understand the biological meaning of differences in spot patterns. This information can be often retrieved from biological databases or obtained with the help of analysis software available over the Web. The use of web services allows extraction of required data from different sources and data representation in a uniform way for all gel image spots or sets of spots. The tight integration of web services into an end-user application allows users to avoid dozens of repetitive operations when querying biological databases.
We have extended Delta2D with a plugin architecture that allows to attach any annotation data to the identified spots. A Delta2D plugin is responsible for communication with a web service, processing and conversion of data returned by the web service. Web services take advantage of XML-based interfaces and use a standardized XML messaging system. Because of this it is fairly easy to develop such plugins. Plugins deliver annotation data to Delta2D, which provides tools for uniform data representation and for data sorting, filtering, and grouping.