Gremlin Language for Querying the BiographDB Integrated Biological Database

In the last decade, biological tasks became much more complex and often their solution requires the simultaneous use of several different resources. Examples of typical bioinformatics scenarios are given by the gene functional studies, the study of microRNA Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms in cancer disease, or the study of protein motifs linked to specific cellular pathways. Available bioinformatics tools give a big contribute in problem solving, but they still require several and time consuming efforts. In this work, we highlight how the Gremlin graph traversal language can be also considered as lingua franca and as a valid middleware tool in the implementation, for instance, of some high-level web based tool to solve complex biological tasks. Gremlin queries are tested via a web interface to our previously developed integrated graph database, BioGraphDB.