CyThesaurus_Plugin

[UNDER CONSTRUCTION]

Introduction

CyThesaurus is a Cytoscape plugin providing identifier mapping services based on various resources. Currently the plugin support ID mapping resources from delimited text, PGDB file and BioMart web service. This plugin utilized BridgeDb API.

Use Cases

5 related use cases have been identified on Bader Lab ID Mapping page. 2 of them are closely related to this project:

• Unification during dataset merging: During a merge operation e.g. of two protein-protein interaction datasets from independently created databases, it is vital to recognize that two protein objects, one from each data source, represent the same protein molecule, even if the protein objects don’t share any database accession numbers. Unification requires knowledge of record type e.g. you cannot reliably use a gene ID to unify proteins (mostly because splice variants exist).

• Identifier translation: Some analysis methods require specific translations from one set of identifiers to another. For instance, our 'activity centers' analysis requires translation from protein or gene identifiers in a pathway database to Affymetrix probe set identifiers or other gene expression array platform identifiers.

Supported ID Mapping Resources

File- based

Delimited text file

• File format (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/mergesvn/testData/yeast_id_mapping.txt):

  • Each column for one ID type
  • Each row except the first one represents IDs of different types mapping to each other
  • First row contains ID types
  • Multiple IDs are allowed to be contained in one cell (One to many mapping, or IDs of the same type maps to each other). Use special character (e.g., ';', '/', etc, or user defined) to separate IDs.

RDB based

PGDB file

• Gene database schema: http://www.bridgedb.org/wiki/GeneDatabaseLayout

• Gene databases are available at http://bridgedb.org/data/gene_database/

Web service based

BioMart web service

BioMart web service has been utilized to provide ID mapping service in this plugin.

BridgeDb web service

Being developed.

PICR web service

Being developed.

Code Base

Currently the plugin is based on Cytoscape 2.6. Porting to Cytoscape 3.0 is in plan.

ID mapping service for other plugin

An inter-plugin communication module was developed to support CyThesaurus plugin providing ID mapping services to other plugins. It is recommended that other plugins, who need to request ID mapping services from CyThesaurus, include the package cytoscape-plugins-comm (.jar, javadoc, src). The following services are supported.

1. Test request: test if the services are available.

   1   String receiver = "CyThesaurus"; // plugin name when passing messages
   2   String type = Message.MSG_TYPE_TEST; // indicate what this message request for
   3   String id = receiver + System.currentTimeMillis();
   4   Message msg = new Message(id, pluginName, receiver, type, null);
   5   List<ResponseMessage> response = PluginsCommunicationSupport.sendMessageAndGetResponses(msg);
   6   if (!response.isempty()) {
   7       // the ID mapping services are available
   8   }
   9 

1. ID mapping request: request to mapping the IDs of source ID types in one attribute to the target ID types and save in the target attribute
2. ID mapping dialog request: request to bring out the ID mapping main dialog
3. ID mapping source config dialog request: request to bring out the ID mapping source configuration dialog
4. ID mapping supported ID types fetching request: request to fetch the supported source and target ID types