webANIMO: Improving the accessibility of ANIMO

摘要

ANIMO is a Cytoscape 3 app to model biological signalling pathways. Useful analyses can be performed and displayed to the user in an effective way. However, all this power comes at a cost: the additional software requirements for ANIMO have been hindering its widespread adoption. Our goal has been to provide beginner to intermediate ANIMO users with a simpler and more effective platform to perform their research: webANIMO. The minimalistic interface provides everything the regular ANIMO user needs for the most common tasks. Adding the fact that it is a web interface removes any software requirements from the equation. This article describes how webANIMO works: its client/server architecture, how Cytoscape and ANIMO compatibility was maintained, the visualization techniques implemented and other general design decisions.