EnrichrBot: Twitter bot tracking tweets about human genes

Abstract

Motivation: Micro-blogging with Twitter to communicate new results, discuss ideas and share techniques is becoming central. While most Twitter users are real people, the Twitter API provides the opportunity to develop Twitter bots and to analyze global trends in tweets.

Results: EnrichrBot is a bot that tracks and tweets information about human genes implementing six principal functions: (i) tweeting information about under-studied genes including non-coding lncRNAs, (ii) replying to requests for information about genes, (iii) responding to GWASbot, another bot that tweets Manhattan plots from genome-wide association study analysis of the UK Biobank, (iv) tweeting randomly selected gene sets from the Enrichr database for analysis with Enrichr, (v) responding to mentions of human genes in tweets with additional information about these genes and (vi) tweeting a weekly report about the most trending genes on Twitter.

Availability and implementation: https://twitter.com/botenrichr; source code: https://github.com/MaayanLab/EnrichrBot.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.