ABSTRACT
Understanding the synapse and its role in the development of psychiatric disorders is not only a demanding but a highly relevant challenge for neuroscience. With the advancement of modern high-throughput technologies, the amount of data collected becomes incomprehensible and the volume of information intractable for the individual scientist. Why Systems Biology opens alternatives to organize information and to deduce knowledge that can be scrutinized by rationally designed experiments? We discuss some of the fundamental ideas why Systems Biology is indeed an alternative to reductionism and show an example how semantics may help to exploit the rich source of the scientific literature to generate qualitative models of functional modules.
Subject(s)
Models, Neurological , Synapses/physiology , Systems Biology/methods , Alzheimer Disease/physiopathology , Brain/physiology , Brain/physiopathology , Humans , Neurosciences/methods , Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted , Software , User-Computer InterfaceABSTRACT
The Munich Information Center for Protein Sequences (MIPS-GSF, Neuherberg, Germany) combines automatic processing of large amounts of sequences with manual annotation of selected model genomes. Due to the massive growth of the available data, the depth of annotation varies widely between independent databases. Also, the criteria for the transfer of information from known to orthologous sequences are diverse. To cope with the task of global in-depth genome annotation has become unfeasible. Therefore, our efforts are dedicated to three levels of annotation: (i) the curation of selected genomes, in particular from fungal and plant taxa (e.g. CYGD, MNCDB, MatDB), (ii) the comprehensive, consistent, automatic annotation employing exhaustive methods for the computation of sequence similarities and sequence-related attributes as well as the classification of individual sequences (SIMAP, PEDANT and FunCat) and (iii) the compilation of manually curated databases for protein interactions based on scrutinized information from the literature to serve as an accepted set of reliable annotated interaction data (MPACT, MPPI, CORUM). All databases and tools described as well as the detailed descriptions of our projects can be accessed through the MIPS web server (http://mips.gsf.de).
Subject(s)
Databases, Protein , Fungal Proteins/chemistry , Fungal Proteins/genetics , Plant Proteins/chemistry , Plant Proteins/genetics , Fungal Proteins/metabolism , Genome, Fungal , Genome, Plant , Genomics , Internet , Plant Proteins/metabolism , Protein Interaction Mapping , Sequence Analysis, Protein , Software , User-Computer InterfaceABSTRACT
The Munich Information Center for Protein Sequences (MIPS at the GSF), Neuherberg, Germany, provides resources related to genome information. Manually curated databases for several reference organisms are maintained. Several of these databases are described elsewhere in this and other recent NAR database issues. In a complementary effort, a comprehensive set of >400 genomes automatically annotated with the PEDANT system are maintained. The main goal of our current work on creating and maintaining genome databases is to extend gene centered information to information on interactions within a generic comprehensive framework. We have concentrated our efforts along three lines (i) the development of suitable comprehensive data structures and database technology, communication and query tools to include a wide range of different types of information enabling the representation of complex information such as functional modules or networks Genome Research Environment System, (ii) the development of databases covering computable information such as the basic evolutionary relations among all genes, namely SIMAP, the sequence similarity matrix and the CABiNet network analysis framework and (iii) the compilation and manual annotation of information related to interactions such as protein-protein interactions or other types of relations (e.g. MPCDB, MPPI, CYGD). All databases described and the detailed descriptions of our projects can be accessed through the MIPS WWW server (http://mips.gsf.de).
Subject(s)
Databases, Genetic , Genomics , Proteins/genetics , Animals , Computational Biology/methods , Evolution, Molecular , Internet , Mice , Models, Genetic , Protein Interaction Mapping , User-Computer InterfaceABSTRACT
The Munich Information Center for Protein Sequences (MIPS-GSF), Neuherberg, Germany, provides protein sequence-related information based on whole-genome analysis. The main focus of the work is directed toward the systematic organization of sequence-related attributes as gathered by a variety of algorithms, primary information from experimental data together with information compiled from the scientific literature. MIPS maintains automatically generated and manually annotated genome-specific databases, develops systematic classification schemes for the functional annotation of protein sequences and provides tools for the comprehensive analysis of protein sequences. This report updates the information on the yeast genome (CYGD), the Neurospora crassa genome (MNCDB), the database of complete cDNAs (German Human Genome Project, NGFN), the database of mammalian protein-protein interactions (MPPI), the database of FASTA homologies (SIMAP), and the interface for the fast retrieval of protein-associated information (QUIPOS). The Arabidopsis thaliana database, the rice database, the plant EST databases (MATDB, MOsDB, SPUTNIK), as well as the databases for the comprehensive set of genomes (PEDANT genomes) are described elsewhere in the 2003 and 2004 NAR database issues, respectively. All databases described, and the detailed descriptions of our projects can be accessed through the MIPS web server (http://mips.gsf.de).
