Just yesterday I was reading tiagos blog where he requested hosting for a computational intensive bioinformatics web-app that he wrote. The application queries and sytematizes mitochondrial genome information from entrez databases, and I assume would be quite useful to animal geneticists and ecologists. Tiago is physically moving institutes and his blog posts talks of his fears of how the app might die if his personal computer goes down.
In one of my personal projects , I have been wrestling with cloning kappa light chains from several monoclonal antibodies that I generated. The cloning required a good knowledge of the anitbody light and heavy chain leader sequences . Several papers I was reading reference the Kabat and Wu database, which catalogs the thousands of sequences of antibodies and other immunological proteins from mouse and humans . Sadly the links to the Kabat and Wu database in some of these papers does not point to any meaningful location. The resulting google and pubmed searches to find this lost data greatly increased the time and effort required to design my cloning experiments.
Which brings me to my question.
In an era when we have free wiki hosting , 4 GB free email access , supercomputers that power maps , gigabyte large free image sharing applications, $6 per month, terabyte bandwidth web hosting. Why are we still so far from an advertisement supported “free” app host for meaningful scientific data ?
Perhaps its because only a few thousand people who are saving a rare turtle species somewhere on this planet will find tiagos web-app useful..Surely thats not yet worth enterprise level attention, or maybe we should all just write our web apps to run off facebook!
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