Evangelos Pafilis1,3, Seán I O'Donoghue1,3, Lars J Jensen1,2,3, Heiko Horn1, Michael Kuhn1, Nigel P Brown1 & Reinhard Schneider1 European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany. NNF Center for Protein Research, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. These authors contributed equally. e-mail: contact@reflect.ws IntroductionTo the editor: Anyone who regularly reads life science literature often comes across names of genes, proteins or small molecules that they would like to know more about. To make this process easier, we have developed a new, free service called Reflect (http://reflect.ws) that can be installed as a plug-in to web browsers, such as Firefox or Internet Explorer. Reflect tags gene, protein and small-molecule names in any web page, typically within a few seconds and without affecting document layout. - Maxine from Bookmarklet

Would be nice to integrate this with http://bit.ly/15HcyO for simple creation and maintenance of wiki pages like those at http://bit.ly/vX9tW (especially beyond mammals and beyond Wikipedia). - Daniel Mietchen

I think this is a fantastic tool for end users, but Daniel's comment about integration with the Gene Wiki just made me think it could also be great for developers. _If_ there were an API, that is. Does Reflect relate a recognized term back to a specific database entry or identifier (e.g., Ensembl/Entrez Gene ID), and if so, can I as a developer get access to it? I'd love to parse all Gene Wiki articles and establish wiki links to other gene pages do de-orphanize them. Would be really cool... - Andrew Su

... actually, we'd thought about doing a similar thing with the WikiProfessional Concept Web Linker API (but haven't spent the time to figure it out yet) or the NCBO OBA http://www.bioontology.org/tools... (but not sure it does genes/proteins real well yet). For its simplicity and apparent accuracy, I'd love to try this out with Reflect... - Andrew Su

Short answers: 1) We do relate the recognized terms to database identifiers; for example, mammalian proteins are specified by their Ensembl identifiers. 2) There is not an API on the production Reflect server, but we are currently working on a SOAP API - it should be ready for you to play within a couple of weeks :) - Lars Juhl Jensen

ugh, no REST interface planned? Given my frozen-in-time programming skills, SOAP is a code word for me to pass it off to a real programmer. ;) - Andrew Su

There may also be a REST interface. If we make this then it will be build on top of the SOAP interface (i.e. all REST calls will be translated to SOAP calls). I hope that we can do this in an automated manner based on the WSDL. In any case, this implies that the REST interface will be made only after we are done with the SOAP interface. - Lars Juhl Jensen