Connecting Neo4j and Cytoscape

by Georg Summer for National Resource for Network Biology (NRNB)

Neo4j provides a potential computational backend for more performance intensive tasks required of Cytoscape. The idea is to allow the user to connect and upload a local Cytoscape graph to a Neo4j instance (on a high performance machine) and then invoke operations on this instance via Cytoscape. The necessary calculations are executed on the Neo4j instance and then streamed back to the client. This approach aims to turn Cytoscape into a thin client and treats a Neo4j server as a mainframe.