Development of a user-friendly Graphical User Interface for a bioinformatics workstation

Abstract

Bioinformatics is a field of science that deals with storing, organizing, retrieving and analyzing biological data. With recent advances in the field of bioinformatics the amount of biological data that is being produced is very voluminous. This has led to the mushrooming of many open source online libraries of information related to life science known as biological databases and tools. As they do not need to register under any authority before going online, a comprehensive list of the databases is unavailable. Along with that the databases are not properly categorized. To utilize the biological resources many research facilities have setup computer laboratories for bioinformatics related research. These labs are difficult to manage as systems constantly malfunction due to inadvertent changes by the researchers. To overcome this problem most labs opt for expensive softwares that restore the system to its original state or restrict the users in certain ways. But these are broad systems and none of them are fully able to cater to the needs of a bioinformatics computer laboratory. Thus arise the need for a user-friendly graphical user interface for a bioinformatics workstation that uses open source bioinformatics tools and online databases. This study was aimed to develop an initial version of such a software for a kiosk-type bioinformatics workstation. The software is designed to run on system startup and categorizes an upgradable list of online databases into a user friendly graphical object. The software also prevents the user from closing the application by all possible means such as shortcuts like Alt+Tab, Alt+F4 etc. It also clears the downloads of the user on system shutdown and reboots the system to its original state prior to using the program. The program is named “Catholicon” which means “a solution to all problems” and will be available freely upon demand.