Morphinome Database - The database of proteins altered by morphine administration - An update.

Morphine is considered a gold standard in pain treatment. Nevertheless, its use could be associated with severe side effects, including drug addiction. Thus, it is very important to understand the molecular mechanism of morphine action in order to develop new methods of pain therapy, or at least to attenuate the side effects of opioids usage. Proteomics allows for the indication of proteins involved in certain biological processes, but the number of items identified in a single study is usually overwhelming. Thus, researchers face the difficult problem of choosing the proteins which are really important for the investigated processes and worth further studies. Therefore, based on the 29 published articles, we created a database of proteins regulated by morphine administration - The Morphinome Database (addiction-proteomics.org). This web tool allows for indicating proteins that were identified during different proteomics studies. Moreover, the collection and organization of such a vast amount of data allows us to find the same proteins that were identified in various studies and to create their ranking, based on the frequency of their identification. STRING and KEGG databases indicated metabolic pathways which those molecules are involved in. This means that those molecular pathways seem to be strongly affected by morphine administration and could be important targets for further investigations. SIGNIFICANCE: The data about proteins identified by different proteomics studies of molecular changes caused by morphine administration (29 published articles) were gathered in the Morphinome Database. Unification of those data allowed for the identification of proteins that were indicated several times by distinct proteomics studies, which means that they seem to be very well verified and important for the entire process. Those proteins might be now considered promising aims for more detailed studies of their role in the molecular mechanism of morphine action.

On the quality evaluation of scientific entities in Poland supported by consistency-driven pairwise comparisons method.

Comparison, rating, and ranking of alternative solutions, in case of multicriteria evaluations, have been an eternal focus of operations research and optimization theory. There exist numerous approaches at practical solving the multicriteria ranking problem. The recent focus of interest in this domain was the event of parametric evaluation of research entities in Poland. The principal methodology was based on pairwise comparisons. For each single comparison, four criteria have been used. One of the controversial points of the assumed approach was that the weights of these criteria were arbitrary. The main focus of this study is to put forward a theoretically justified way of extracting weights from the opinions of domain experts. Theoretical bases for the whole procedure are based on a survey and its experimental results. Discussion and comparison of the two resulting sets of weights and the computed inconsistency indicator are discussed.

Morphinome--a meta-analysis applied to proteomics studies in morphine dependence.

This review is a meta-analysis of data describing proteins regulated by morphine influence studied worldwide across last years administration. Up to date (July 2010), 15 studies concerning this subject have been published. Animal models, examined brain structures, the route of morphine administration and proteomic platforms used for identification of differentially expressed proteins were described. Standardization of obtained results allowed for creation of database of proteins, whose expression was altered by morphine administration (www.addiction-proteomics.org). Their analysis by tools available in Celera Panther Database was possible too. Proteins, which seem to be the most promising candidates for further research, due to their consistent appearance in different studies, were indicated. Created database may facilitate further studies by providing a possibility to compare results obtained during different experiments. At the end, dynamic picture of proteome after morphine administration, which emerges from the obtained results, is discussed and need for standardization of proteomics experiments is stressed. As meta-analysis is a very powerful tool for evaluation and comparison of multiple data. We believe this approach will be useful in the nearest future to extract vital information from a vast number of similar publications. Morphinome database created already by our group is a comfortable tool for validation and verification of new data received after morphine influence on proteomes investigations. It gives a chance for fast comparison of results without hours spent on life science literature mining.