Gaia Dashboard

An interactive visualization dashboard for exploring the geographic history of human genetic ancestry, based on gaia by Grundler et al. (2024). This project includes data processing pipelines, a Rust backend API, and a React frontend visualization interface which can be found at https://chris-a-talbot.com/gaia_visualizer.

Project Structure

gaia_dashboard/
├── frontend/          # React visualization interface
│   ├── src/          # React source code
│   ├── public/       # Static assets
│   └── package.json  # Frontend dependencies
├── backend/          # Rust API server
│   ├── src/          # Rust source code
│   └── Cargo.toml    # Backend dependencies
└── data_processing/  # R scripts for data preparation
    └── *.R           # Data processing pipelines

Components

Frontend Visualization

• Interactive map interface using DeckGL and Mapbox
• Real-time data visualization of genetic ancestry patterns
• Customizable visualization controls
• Built with React, TypeScript, and WebGL

Backend API

• REST API for serving processed genetic data
• Efficient data querying and filtering
• Built with Rust and Axum framework
• PostgreSQL database for data storage

Data Processing

• R scripts for processing raw genetic data
• Geographic coordinate transformation
• Flux calculations and data aggregation
• Migration path analysis

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v16 or higher)
• Rust (latest stable)
• R (v4.0 or higher)
• PostgreSQL (v13 or higher)
• Mapbox API token

Setup

Frontend

cd frontend
npm install
# Create .env with your Mapbox token
echo "REACT_APP_MAPBOX_TOKEN=your_token_here" > .env
npm start

Backend

cd backend
cargo build
cargo run

Development

1. Start the backend server:

cd backend
cargo run

2. Start the frontend development server:

cd frontend
npm start

The frontend will be available at http://localhost:3000

Production Deployment

Frontend

cd frontend
npm run build

Backend

cd backend
cargo build --release

Data Sources

• Human Genome Diversity Project data
• Grundler et al. (2024) gaia analysis
• Geographic reference data (landgrid)
• Mapbox Studio custom maps

License

Research and code released under CC-BY 4.0 International license.

Citation

If you use this visualization in your research, please cite:

Grundler, M. C., Terhorst, J., & Bradburd, G. S. (2024). A geographic history of human genetic ancestry. bioRxiv.