Biodiversity and Aging
Holly MillerLongevity and the process of aging are topics of perennial human interest as expressed by explorers like Alexander the Great and Juan Ponce de Leon searching for a river or spring to heal or reverse the process of aging or by modern scientists studying biology of aging. Just a short walk across the MBL campus from EOL’s Biodiversity Informatics group resides the team charged with creating the Biology of Aging portal.
The Biology of Aging (BoA) project, funded by the Ellison Medical Foundation and hosted at the MBL/WHOI Library has two goals. The first is to gather, organize, and share information related to the biology of aging and lifespan development processes across the entire spectra of life and provide that information to EOL and biologists studying the basic processes of aging. A second goal is to develop informatics tools to aid in the discovery of information, trends and hypotheses related to aging.
LigerCat - Explore Biomedical literature
One tool that the BoA team has developed is LigerCat. LigerCat is a tool that helps people search the biomedical literature at PubMed/Medline (National Library of Medicine’s database of articles) and see the results as a tag cloud of biomedically relevant terms. We have used LigerCat to find and display terms for species in EOL. For instance here is the tag cloud for articles related to polar bears (Ursus maritimus ):
Every species with a LigerCat cloud will have “Biomedical Terms” in the Table of Contents section of the page.
Finding Aging Information
In order to gather information about lifespan and other related data we are creating computer applications that can ‘read’ text and extract the relevant information. We use Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for extracting information from text. The NLP tool is trained to recognize lifespan related words and phrases. Using tools like this we hope to find more aging information in scanned literature like the Biodiversity Heritage Library. This information will enable scientists to make comparisons over groups of organisms that may lead to the development of a new understanding of the processes of aging and the development of aging related diseases.
BoA Team
Currently three developers work full time creating the Biology of Aging portal. Ryan Schenk is the Web Application Architect, Lakshmi Manohar Akella is the Natural Language Processing Analyst, and Anthony Goddard is a Developer and Systems Administrator. Dr. Holly Miller is the Project Leader. Cathy Norton is the Director of the MBLWHOI Library. Watch the EOL blog and the Biology of Aging blog for future developments.
BoA Team, left to right (Favorite EOL species): Lakshmi Manohar Akella (lion) Holly Miller (black-capped chickadee ), Cathy Norton (tuatara), Ryan Schenk (hedgehog gourd), Anthony Goddard (polar bear).