AHIDA: a web platform for animal genetics research

My big project at work this year has been developing AHIDA, a new platform for animal genetics research. The site's still in development, but aims to make it easy for pet owners, livestock breeders and vets to report on inherited diseases they've seen in animals.

The site uses a Django backend and a Next.js frontend. A major requirement of the site is it needs to guide people through describing the signs and symptoms they're seeing in the animals. To do this we make use of a lot of existing biology knowledge, represented in the form on ontologies. That way, people trying to describe their cat's dislocated kneecap (which my cat Newt dealt with last year, all good now) can search either for "patella" or "kneecap" and get relevant results:

The long term plan is to connect this data up to OMIA, an existing database of genetic conditions in animals, which I've also done a lot of work on recently.

The code is not public but some of the tools I've created during development are, e.g. ols-py, a client for accessing ontology data. ols-py uses Pydantic, a data validation library that makes really good use of Python's type annotations, letting you interact with API data in a robust way.