Gin: Genomic In

Simon Walker

June 17th, 2026

Installation

If available in Hex, the package can be installed by adding gin to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:gin, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

Documentation can be generated with ExDoc and published on HexDocs. Once published, the docs can be found at https://hexdocs.pm/gin.

Guide

⏺ The quickest way is iex -S mix, then call the pipeline directly:

Start the REPL

iex -S mix

Fetch a hub and inspect a track

alias Gin.Hub.Client
alias Gin.Meta.Transformer

{:ok, tracks} = Client.fetch_all_tracks("http://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/blueprint/releases/current_release/homo_sapiens/hub/hub.txt")

Look at one raw track (before transformation)

tracks |> List.first() |> IO.inspect(pretty: true)

Transform it

meta = tracks |> List.first() |> Transformer.transform()
IO.inspect(meta, pretty: true)

Check what's left in other across all tracks

tracks
|> Enum.map(&Transformer.transform/1)
|> Enum.flat_map(fn m -> Map.keys(m.other) end)
|> Enum.frequencies()
|> Enum.sort_by(fn {_, v} -> -v end)

For the ALFA hub (simpler, faster):

{:ok, tracks} = Client.fetch_all_tracks("https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/snp/population_frequency/TrackHub/latest/hub.txt")

And the automated tests:

mix test # all 44 tests
mix test test/gin/meta/ # just meta/transformer/vocab tests
mix test --trace # verbose, shows each test name

The test suite covers the transformer and parser in isolation with inline fixture data, so it runs instantly without any network calls.