Biological Database of Images and Genomes: tools for community annotations linking image and genomic information

TL;DR

BioDIG is a versatile software framework that enables linking biomedical images to genomic data, facilitating integrated annotations and research across phenotype-genotype studies.

Contribution

The paper introduces BioDIG, a novel software toolkit that connects image and genomic data, supporting community annotation and rapid web-based research setup.

Findings

BioDIG enables linking of images to genomic data.

MyDIG website demonstrates practical application.

Supports large-scale community annotations.

Abstract

Genomic data and biomedical imaging data are undergoing exponential growth. However, our understanding of the phenotype-genotype connection linking the two types of data is lagging behind. While there are many types of software that enable the manipulation and analysis of image data and genomic data as separate entities, there is no framework established for linking the two. We present a generic set of software tools, BioDIG, that allows linking of image data to genomic data. BioDIG tools can be applied to a wide range of research problems that require linking images to genomes. BioDIG features the following: rapid construction of web-based workbenches, community-based annotation, user management, and web-services. By using BioDIG to create websites, researchers and curators can rapidly annotate large number of images with genomic information. Here we present the BioDIG software tools that include an image module, a genome module and a user management module. We also introduce a BioDIG-based website, MyDIG, which is being used to annotate images of Mycoplasma.