Metaome has released the DistilBio Terms  bookmarklet which detects and lists biomedical concepts such as genes, proteins, drugs, compounds and pathway mentioned in a webpage. This is similar to the app released by Metaome for Elsevier’s ScienceDirect. Now the app can be used on any webpage. The user has to install the bookmarklet in their browser’s bookmark bar once and has to only push the button to highlight all recognized terms in a page.

The DistilBio bookmarklet detects the terms using relevant life-science ontologies and synonyms. Clicking on the terms takes the user to the DistilBio site that displays all the connections available for the term. The results are derived from many publicly available data sources such as Uniprot, Drugbank, PharmGKB, OMIM, CTD, Chembl, Chemspider, IntAct, MINT and Gene Ontology and presented as a set of connections.

To see how the bookmarklet works, let us look at an article related to biology on the net. I found a paper in plosone.org and clicked on the DistilBio Terms button. This displays a panel on the right of the page with a list of  detected in the paper and categorized into pathway, genes, proteins, drugs, diseases, compounds and organisms. Clicking on any of the terms takes the user to the DistilBio site and displays all the connections available for the term.

Try it on your data too

This app can also be used by users to find terms in their data which are not webpages. All the user has to do is go to http://terms.distilbio.com/tools and click on the “Try it” button. The user can now copy & paste their data in the box and hit submit. All biomedical concepts are detected and displayed as clickable links to the DisitlBio data.

The terms are displayed as below

A disclaimer is that the context of some of the results shown may differ from what is referred to in the article. The user will have to use their discretion while viewing the results.

Installing the bookmarklet is very simple.

1. Go to http://terms.distilbio.com/tools.
2. Display your Bookmarks bar by hitting Shift+Ctrl+B
3. Drag the “DistilBio Terms” button (displayed in the site) to your Bookmarks bar.
4. When you are browsing the web, push the “DistilBio terms” button to highlight all recognized terms in the page.

This app is best viewed in Firefox 3.4+ or Chrome 10.1+

We would love to hear from you. Do leave your feedback & suggestions as comments in this blog or drop us an email at info@metaome.com