A biochemical cascade, also known as a signaling cascade or signaling pathway, is a series of chemical reactions that occur within a biological cell when initiated by a stimulus. This stimulus, known as a first messenger, acts on a receptor that is transduced to the cell interior through second messengers which amplify the signal and transfer it to effector molecules, causing the cell to respond to the initial stimulus. Most biochemical cascades are series of events, in which one event triggers the next, in a linear fashion. At each step of the signaling cascade, various controlling factors are involved to regulate cellular actions, in order to respond effectively to cues about their changing internal and external environments.
The DrugBank database is a comprehensive, freely accessible, online database containing information on drugs and drug targets created and maintained by the University of Alberta and The Metabolomics Innovation Centre located in Alberta, Canada. As both a bioinformatics and a cheminformatics resource, DrugBank combines detailed drug data with comprehensive drug target information. DrugBank has used content from Wikipedia; Wikipedia also often links to Drugbank, posing potential circular reporting issues.
KEGG is a collection of databases dealing with genomes, biological pathways, diseases, drugs, and chemical substances. KEGG is utilized for bioinformatics research and education, including data analysis in genomics, metagenomics, metabolomics and other omics studies, modeling and simulation in systems biology, and translational research in drug development.
The Biological General Repository for Interaction Datasets (BioGRID) is a curated biological database of protein-protein interactions, genetic interactions, chemical interactions, and post-translational modifications created in 2003 (originally referred to as simply the General Repository for Interaction Datasets by Mike Tyers, Bobby-Joe Breitkreutz, and Chris Stark at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital. It strives to provide a comprehensive curated resource for all major model organism species while attempting to remove redundancy to create a single mapping of data. Users of The BioGRID can search for their protein, chemical or publication of interest and retrieve annotation, as well as curated data as reported, by the primary literature and compiled by in house large-scale curation efforts. The BioGRID is hosted in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and Dallas, Texas, United States and is partnered with the Saccharomyces Genome Database, FlyBase, WormBase, PomBase, and the Alliance of Genome Resources. The BioGRID is funded by the NIH and CIHR. BioGRID is an observer member of the International Molecular Exchange Consortium.
Reactome is a free online database of biological pathways. It is manually curated and authored by PhD-level biologists, in collaboration with Reactome editorial staff. The content is cross-referenced to many bioinformatics databases. The rationale behind Reactome is to visually represent biological pathways in full mechanistic detail, while making the source data available in a computationally accessible format.
GenMAPP is a free, open-source bioinformatics software tool designed to visualize and analyze genomic data in the context of pathways, connecting gene-level datasets to biological processes and disease. First created in 2000, GenMAPP is developed by an open-source team based in an academic research laboratory. GenMAPP maintains databases of gene identifiers and collections of pathway maps in addition to visualization and analysis tools. Together with other public resources, GenMAPP aims to provide the research community with tools to gain insight into biology through the integration of data types ranging from genes to proteins to pathways to disease.
MicrobesOnline is a publicly and freely accessible website that hosts multiple comparative genomic tools for comparing microbial species at the genomic, transcriptomic and functional levels. MicrobesOnline was developed by the Virtual Institute for Microbial Stress and Survival, which is based at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. The site was launched in 2005, with regular updates until 2011.
Transcription factor SOX-6 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the SOX6 gene.
Anders Krogh is a bioinformatician at the University of Copenhagen, where he leads the university's bioinformatics center. He is known for his pioneering work on the use of hidden Markov models in bioinformatics, and is co-author of a widely used textbook in bioinformatics. In addition, he also co-authored one of the early textbooks on neural networks. His current research interests include promoter analysis, non-coding RNA, gene prediction and protein structure prediction.
In molecular biology, STRING is a biological database and web resource of known and predicted protein–protein interactions.
Lincoln David Stein is a scientist and Professor in bioinformatics and computational biology at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.
Pathway Commons is a database of biological pathways and interactions.
The Small Molecule Pathway Database (SMPDB) is a comprehensive, high-quality, freely accessible, online database containing more than 600 small molecule (i.e. metabolic) pathways found in humans. SMPDB is designed specifically to support pathway elucidation and pathway discovery in metabolomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and systems biology. It is able to do so, in part, by providing colorful, detailed, fully searchable, hyperlinked diagrams of five types of small molecule pathways: 1) general human metabolic pathways; 2) human metabolic disease pathways; 3) human metabolite signaling pathways; 4) drug-action pathways and 5) drug metabolism pathways. SMPDB pathways may be navigated, viewed and zoomed interactively using a Google Maps-like interface. All SMPDB pathways include information on the relevant organs, subcellular compartments, protein cofactors, protein locations, metabolite locations, chemical structures and protein quaternary structures (Fig. 1). Each small molecule in SMPDB is hyperlinked to detailed descriptions contained in the HMDB or DrugBank and each protein or enzyme complex is hyperlinked to UniProt. Additionally, all SMPDB pathways are accompanied with detailed descriptions and references, providing an overview of the pathway, condition or processes depicted in each diagram. Users can browse the SMPDB (Fig. 2) or search its contents by text searching (Fig. 3), sequence searching, or chemical structure searching. More powerful queries are also possible including searching with lists of gene or protein names, drug names, metabolite names, GenBank IDs, Swiss-Prot IDs, Agilent or Affymetrix microarray IDs. These queries will produce lists of matching pathways and highlight the matching molecules on each of the pathway diagrams. Gene, metabolite and protein concentration data can also be visualized through SMPDB's mapping interface.
PathVisio is a free open-source pathway analysis and drawing software. It allows drawing, editing, and analyzing biological pathways. Visualization of ones experimental data on the pathways for finding relevant pathways that are over-represented in your data set is possible.
Single nucleotide polymorphism annotation is the process of predicting the effect or function of an individual SNP using SNP annotation tools. In SNP annotation the biological information is extracted, collected and displayed in a clear form amenable to query. SNP functional annotation is typically performed based on the available information on nucleic acid and protein sequences.
Probable E3 ubiquitin-protein ligase HERC3 is an enzyme that in humans is encoded by the HERC3 gene. The gene is a member of the HERC family of ubiquitin ligases and encodes a protein with a HECT domain and an RCC1-like domain (RLD). It binds ubiquitin and hPLIC-1/2 via its HECT domain. Alternatively spiced transcript variants encoding multiple isoforms have been observed, and mutations in this gene have been linked to colorectal and gastric carcinomas. The protein is localized in the cytosol and vesicular-like structures containing β-COP, ARF, and Rab5. Since HERC3 can itself be ubiquitinated and degraded by the proteasome, it likely has roles in both vesicular traffic and ubiquitin-dependent processes.
Biocuration is the field of life sciences dedicated to organizing biomedical data, information and knowledge into structured formats, such as spreadsheets, tables and knowledge graphs. The biocuration of biomedical knowledge is made possible by the cooperative work of biocurators, software developers and bioinformaticians and is at the base of the work of biological databases.
