What is Medusa?
Medusa is a front end (interface) to the STRING protein interaction
database.
It is also a general graph visualization tool.
Why use it?
The STRING web interface, while extensive, is static. It does not allow users to create their own networks, enhanced with STRING interactions. Medusa will give users greater freedom in manipulating STRING data. As a general tool, Medusa is very easy to use and flexible. Users can load their own data or interactively add or delete nodes and edges. It is also free for academic use and easy to install. Medusa was originally a house tool at EMBL and has been used in a number of successful scientific projects. We hope that others too can benefit from Medusa.
Does it cost anything?
Medusa is distributed under the Gnu Public License and costs nothing. The only thing we (Sean Hooper, Peer Bork) ask is that you please cite us. We are research scientists and citations are very important to us.
Please cite Hooper SD, Bork P. (2005) Medusa: a simple tool for interaction graph analysis. Bioinformatics. 2005 Sep 27
Where do I download it?
Just click the link on the left margin. Note: Sometimes, PCs running windows decide to rename medusa.jar to medusa.zip. I don't know why this happens or what to do about it. If this happens, rename the file so it ends properly with '.jar'
News
- 2007-01-24 Medusa is now open-source.
- 2006-11-22 Graph editor added. Check "edit graph" under "manipulate"!
- 2006-09-18 Several bugs fixed, especially with the applet version. You can now link to other URLs by shift-clicking on nodes.
- 2006-04-25 Interaction panel has been improved. You can now have any number of interactions. I will do the same for the applet soon... I hope.
- 2006-04-05 Fixed a number of things in Medusa. Also, the tutorial is finally up! Sorry for the delay...
- 2005-10-28 STRING was down for a few hours and Medusa could not retrieve data. This may happen now and again, but we promise to keep these events rare and to fix them as soon as possible.
- 2005-10-20 Fixed a bug which messes up saved files when using the panel scale function. Fixed export to PS. Should be better now.
- 2005-10-18 Medusa will be published soon in Bioinformatics! Thanks to all testers for their helpful comments!
