Biobtree: A tool to search, map and visualize bioinformatics identifiers and special keywords

Abstract

Due to their nature, bioinformatics datasets are often closely related to each other. For this reason, search, mapping and visualization of these relations are often performed manually or programmatically via identifiers or special keywords such as gene symbols. Although various tools exist for these situations, the growing volume of bioinformatics datasets, emerging new software tools and approaches motivates new solutions. To provide a new tool for these current cases, I present the Biobtree bioinformatics tool. Biobtree effectively fetches and indexes identifiers and special keywords with their related identifiers from supported datasets, optionally with user pre-defined datasets and provides a web interface, web services and direct B+ tree data structure based single uniform database output. Biobtree can handle billions of identifiers and runs via a single executable file with no installation and dependency required. It also aims to provide a relatively small codebase for easy maintenance, addition of new features and extension to larger datasets. Biobtree is available to download from GitHub.