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We do research in systems biology. We prefer to use existing data sets, because collecting new biological data is expensive. Thus, a lot of the scripts we write are little more than transformations of one data set into another. Eventually, we put our results online -- and more and more journals are requiring this sort of thing. So it was no great leap for me to try using Rails for my projects. I can set up easily reproducible experiments, transform data step by step through database tables (e.g. using rake), and display results using gems like flotomatic and the gnuplot. If I need something to run very quickly, I can even write a custom gem in C++ using Rice , or parallelize using starling and workling . Eventually, I started to wonder if anyone else was using Rails to do bioinformatics or science in general. I thought, "If I were a science research Rails gem, what would I do?" What extra features would such a gem have? Perhaps a Migration adaptation into a rake-able pipeline? Maybe more advanced graphing features? Built-in background jobs?

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