"Ras is a monomeric membrane-associated GTP-binding protein that regulates cell proliferation and survival in response to extracellular stimuli, such as activation of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) of T cell receptor (TCR). Originally identified as an oncogene in murine sarcoma viruses, activating mutations in Ras have been found in about 30% of human tumors. Dysregulation of the Ras signaling pathway plays a key role in the progression of cancer. When bound to GTP, Ras is active and stimulates several downstream targets by direct interactions."
References: Megan Cully and Julian Downward, Cancer Research UK London Research Institute, London WC2A 3PX, UK.
A quick demo
At Mayo Clinic's Health Sciences Research lab in Scottasdale, a gradute student wants a website to display his Ras-Signaling project for academic publications. But he was not able to do so because of unfamiliarity with web design.
As an intern(offer letter) , my goal was to create an interactive website of Ras Signaling that would help the project publication by saving researchers/pubilshers' time to navigate the project instead of reading through the long paper.
I designed a new web page to present the pdf by studying online libraries for web development, such as GO.js, a JavaScript library for implementing custom interactive diagrams and data visualizations. However, it didn't work well for this project because the project required high-level customization, such as the link between nodes should look similar to the originial pdf or look pretty at least. So I chose to write pure JavaScript code to define various links and nodes.
Also, I tried to improve user experience using my own judegement. I moved the links explanation on the pdf to the top of the navbar using PhotoShop, so it showed details when readers hovering mouses on it. Further, I committed project updates once the graduate student had updated data/requirements. To make it easy for him, I used Node.js to convert the Excel sheets data into JSON data so he could focus on spreadsheets without understanding UI development.
This website helped to faster the paper review process a lot. And the graduate student and lab leaders were satisfied with my work as it was an innovative way to display complex biomedical projects with dragable and clickable noeds, various types of links and other functionalities.