Topics for Discussion During the October Volunteer Vote for Tasks

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Task	Description
Enhancement of the basic functionality of Open Genes, bug fixing, and testing	Enhancing the functionality of filters on the backend Development of functionality for gene group intersection and graph generation Migration of remaining endpoints from the legacy API to the new API.
Adding functionality to Open Genes for searching combinations of gene targets based on new features	We aim to make Open Genes a tool for searching combinations of gene targets for experiment planning. This will be achieved by adding new filters to the API and improving the visual interface of the application.
Improvement of the Open Genes infrastructure	Open Genes consists of several applications and tools for testing, building, delivering, and deploying them. We want to use tools that simplify certain processes and make the applications more stable.
Development of a package for bioinformaticians in Python	Biologists and bioinformaticians write code in Python in Jupyter Notebook or Google Colab environments. Biologists have a large set of libraries that facilitate data work. When they need to fetch data from well-known biological services, they also do it using their official packages from pip or Conda. We want more scientists to use our product, and developing a wrapper package for our API will help biologists get acquainted with Open Genes.
Development of a package for bioinformaticians in R	Biologists have a large set of libraries in R that facilitate data work. When they need to fetch data from well-known biological services, they also do it using their official packages from pip or Conda. We want more scientists to use our product, and developing a wrapper package for our API will help biologists get acquainted with Open Genes.
Design development for browsing Open Genes on mobile phones	65% of site users access it from mobile devices. We want to make the Open Genes website more user-friendly for them.
Create a dataset by collecting data on genes from the Open Genes database on whether a gene undergoes alternative splicing with age	Age-related changes in alternative splicing are an interesting research topic for aging.
Performance improvement of the database and API, adaptation for high loads	Open Genes is a public service providing biological data for individual researchers and other applications. We need to optimize the backend's performance to reduce CPU and RAM load on the server, make the application and database more stable, and have the ability to scale the service in the future.
Implementation and development of full-text search	Full-text search will allow searching for gene and research data based on their content.
Description of a gene ranking system considering all parameters of conducted experiments. Development of frontend and backend functionality. Writing a scientific article.	The more accurately we rank genes, the more accurately we can establish the gene's connection to aging. By considering the quality and quantity of experiments supporting a result, we can identify the most proven targets for aging therapy. Developing a scoring system will enable more precise enrichment analysis. We already have data to assess the quality of experiments, and the approach to creating such a ranking system can help other researchers as well.
Add data on signaling pathways from Reactome or Kegg. Work on biology, frontend, and backend.	Researchers need to see which proteins interact with a gene product and in which processes it is involved. We would like to add this data to link them to genes in the database and enable filtering by signaling pathways.
Analysis of genes from Open Genes – find where to scrape data on chromosomal territories, the location of enhancers, and insulators on chromosomes, collect a dataset, and present the results with a description of the work done.