In the mid-2000s, the Scientific Data Analysis Lab collaborated with Prof. Sean Mooney at the IU School of Medicine to create some web services for life science. In a nutshell, we extended two open source molecular visualizaton tools (UCSF Chimera and PyMOL) to communicate with Prof Mooney's backend databases (MutDB and S-BLEST) to graphically display bioinformatics information related to proteins. The project relied heavily on the Python scripting language.
LifeScienceWeb Services: Integrated Analysis of Protein Structural Data (high-res poster)
MutDB services: interactive structural analysis of mutation data
J. Dantzer, C. Moad, R. Heiland, S. Mooney
Nucleic Acids Research, Vol 33, July 2005
Identification of Similar Regions of Protein Structures Using Integrated Sequence and Structure Analysis Tools
B. Peters, C. Moad, E. Youn, K. Buffington, R. Heiland, S.D. Mooney
BMC Structural Biology 2006, 6:4
MutDB: update on development of tools for the biochemical analysis of genetic variation
Arti Singh, Adebayo Olowoyeye, Peter H. Baenziger, Jessica Dantzer, Maricel G. Kann, Predrag Radivojac, Randy Heiland, Sean D. Mooney
Nucleic Acids Research 2007
Python for Scientific Gateways Development
Randy Heiland, Sean D. Mooney, Joshua Boverhof, Keith Jackson, Marcus Christie, Maciek Swat, Ariel Balter, Joseph Insley
Proceedings of Grid Computing Environments (GCE) workshop, Supercomputing 2007, Reno, NV.