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Mitowatch

Personal research monitor for a rare mitochondrial DNA variant.

Live
A Mitowatch daily digest email, sorted into tiers by how closely each new finding matches the tracked variant

Summary

Mitowatch watches the medical and scientific literature for new findings on a rare mitochondrial DNA variant. It pulls daily from PubMed, ClinicalTrials.gov, ClinVar, MITOMAP, bioRxiv/medRxiv, and news sources, deduplicates what's new across runs, and emails a digest each morning.

Why it exists

Rare variants don't have communities behind them. The rate of new research is too slow to justify checking by hand and too fast to ignore for long stretches. Mitowatch turns "I should check on this sometime" into "I'll know if anything actually changes."

How it works

Six sources, each with its own fetch path: official APIs where available, HTML scraping where not. Everything normalizes into a shared schema, gets deduped against prior runs, and ranks by recency and source weight before going into a daily email digest.

Stack

  • Python 3.11
  • SQLite state + dedupe
  • Railway daily cron

Status

Live. Running daily. Quiet most days, occasional digest with a real finding.