Thank you for your interest in biology.
Yes, Lua is used for data-storage for genome information data in my
project. They are metadata, i.e. annotation describing functions and
comment of region in the long DNA sequence repository, just like:
locus_humgalab={
{ symbol="exon", pos1=885, pos2=1138, desc="GLA"},
{ symbol="CDS", pos1=945, pos2=">1138",
db_xref="AAA52514.1" },
...
}
We may take hierarchical ways. From this example, people might
also think that XML could be applied in this domain.
However, there are many practical problems which you can guess
from the second data with pos2=">1138". It means that
the pos2 is somewhere more than 1138.
That kind of data handling is a trivial task for Lua, while
simple DTD in XML fails for the data validation.
In addition, biology is the domain which changes data contents and
quantity so quickly. There are new discoveries every month.
Lua is good for designing new data model and re-constitutions of
databases. I found that Lua is extremely useful in molecular biology
data representation/processing.
From: "Yutaka Ueno" <uenoyt@ni.aist.go.jp>
I found Lua is the best in data description for various molecular
biology data, such as human genome databases.
From: "Martin Spernau" <martin@traumwind.de>
That sounds intersting!
Could you maybe give a short example of how you express/store this data in
Lua?
Do you use Lua-code as a form of data-storage?
---Yutaka Ueno
