Feature WishList

This is a running list of proposed features at WormBase

Human disease

We need broader integration of human diseases. This is a benefit both to people who use C. elegans as a model system (most grants at least true to touch on the relevance of given projects with human disease) as well as those looking to the system to help understand orthologous genes implicated in disease.

Requirements:

• should be possible to search by disease IDs and common names
• genes with human orthologs implicated in disease should be clearly noted, probably in the Overview widget.
• Should link back to OMIM

Status:

• OMIM IDs in database; need brief descriptions?
• Is there an OMIM web service we can consume?

Ontologies

We don't too much with ontology other than display a list of associations for a given object. What else can we do? For example, on the gene page, we could expand the ontology section to show genes with similar patterns of enrichment. We might also consider integrate a tool like AmiGO to make it easier to browse ontologies.

Suggestions:

• show other genes with similar (aggregate) gene ontology

Homology/Orthology

We list homologs and orthologs of genes but provide no alignments. These should be readily available from the gene page.

Suggestions:

• (pre-generate) alignments with orthologs via BLASTX
• display in-line on the homology page or perhaps in lightbox
• when available, overlay variations to help identify conserved and critical motifs

Variations

Mapping molecularly characterized variations against protein domains and cross referencing with phenotypes to infer domain/protein function.