PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Sebastien Lelong AU - Xinghua Zhou AU - Cyrus Afrasiabi AU - Zhongchao Qian AU - Marco Alvarado Cano AU - Ginger Tsueng AU - Jiwen Xin AU - Julia Mullen AU - Yao Yao AU - Ricardo Avila AU - Greg Taylor AU - Andrew I Su AU - Chunlei Wu TI - BioThings SDK: a toolkit for building high-performance data APIs in biomedical research AID - 10.1101/2021.10.18.464256 DP - 2021 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 2021.10.18.464256 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/10/19/2021.10.18.464256.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/10/19/2021.10.18.464256.full AB - Summary To meet the increased need of making biomedical resources more accessible and reusable, Web APIs or web services have become a common way to disseminate knowledge sources. The BioThings APIs are a collection of high-performance, scalable, annotation as a service APIs that automate the integration of biological annotations from disparate data sources. This collection of APIs currently includes MyGene.info, MyVariant.info, and MyChem.info for integrating annotations on genes, variants, and chemical compounds, respectively. These APIs are used by both individual researchers and application developers to simplify the process of annotation retrieval and identifier mapping. Here, we describe the BioThings Software Development Kit (SDK), a generalizable and reusable toolkit for integrating data from multiple disparate data sources and creating high-performance APIs. This toolkit allows users to easily create their own BioThings APIs for any data type of interest to them, as well as keep APIs up-to-date with their underlying data sources.Availability and implementation The BioThings SDK is built in Python and released via PyPI (https://pypi.org/project/biothings/).Its source code is hosted at its github repository (https://github.com/biothings/biothings.api).Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.