Using the Gremlin language to solve biological tasks: a case study on BioGraphDB

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 bionformatics tools give a big contribute in problem solving, but they still require some time consuming. In this work, we highlight how the Gremlin graph traversal language can be also considered as lingua franca and valid middleware tool at the service, for instance, of some high-level web based tool to solve complex biological tasks.