Last week we talked about "mash-ups," the combination of online resources from disparate sources, and pointed out that Google Maps and Google Earth were favorite substrates for this. Declan Butler, senior correspondent at Nature, is the first we know of to construct a Google Earth mashup for bird flu. Now there is a very sophisticated version from scientists at the University of Colorado and Ohio State University:
The research team has tracked the spread avian flu around the globe over time by specific host groups of birds, mammals and insects. (Credit: CU-Boulder, Ohio State University)
A team of biomedical experts, led by Daniel Janies, an assistant professor in the department of biomedical informatics at Ohio State University, used special software to create an evolutionary tree of the virus's mutations. They used Keyhole Markup Language in Google Earth to project the tree onto the globe and then chose colors and symbols to indicate different hosts that carry the virus and where they live. TimeSpan, another function in Google Earth, allowed them to animate the spread of the virus over the past decade.
The map is chock-full of additional information. Clicking on a specific viral subtype generates a popup window revealing diagnostic mutations that distinguish one strain of the virus from another, and all of the data is linked to the National Institute of Health's GenBank. (ScienceDaily)
It isn't clear at the moment whether this representation will lead to new insights (which hasn't stopped the authors from claiming it will). There is a slick online demo movie showing it in action, although much about its use isn't explained. The details are in a paper behind a subscription firewall in the journal Systematic Biology. If this were published in an Open Access journal, it would get more coverage.
But it isn't.
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For those who are interested, the Google Earth file can be found here:
http://systbio.org/?q=node/184
At uni so haven't tried it out yet, but looking forward to it.
First impressions are that the taxonomic mapping system isn't worth a damn. Most egregiously, the data on Vietnamese isolates is lumped into a single point on the map (which happens to be in Laos!)...despite the extremely detailed OIE reporting which Declan has used in his maps to isolate to the provinces. Aren't the isolates linked to specific reports?
The way I read it, they represent the hypothetical taxonomic linkages of the viral sequencdes to one another is as altitudes. Hypothetical taxanomies exist above ground, whereas sequenced isolates are repersented at groudn level. What struck me at first glace was that it could potentially lead to people assuming that the taxonomic links are suspected transmission routes between clusters.