A Public Database Resource for Apoptosis Research and Education

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Apoptosis (programmed cell death) research is currently among the three fastest growing topics in worldwide biomedical research. Apoptosis plays a critical role in a wide variety of normal physiological processes. Significant data and knowledge are being accumulated on the complex apoptotic pathway, yet no resource exists to appropriately collate this information for the purposes of education and research. With extremely rapid growth of the available experimental data, the problem with redundant research is growing as illustrated with conflicting nomenclature and multiple re-discovery of the same proteins by independent groups.This project assists a rapidly growing community of apoptosis research by providing a public, WEB based resource that brings together all available information about apoptosis and its related proteins. In particular, the resource will contain a searchable database containing information about the following:-Families of proteins involved in apoptosis, including their domain structure, phylogenetic relations, and functional motifs.-Links to literature describing specific experiments with details about function of all proteins.-Three-dimensional structure (or predicted structure) of apoptosis related proteins.-Lists of uncharacterized proteins with domains known for their role in apoptosis.Expertise of leading apoptosis researchers is used to develop the preliminary version of the databases that are then supported by automated methods for finding new sequences, structures, and text information related to apoptosis that appear in various Internet-accessible resources. Once implemented, these automate as far as possible the collection of current, well-annotated data on apoptosis for a worldwide community of users. In addition, novel algorithms for structure and function prediction from sequence are used to enhance existing information with hypotheses about structure and molecular mechanism of function of apoptosis-related proteins, helping to plan and develop new experiments. This project thus provides the rapidly growing community of apoptosis research an access to consistently complete and current data. The prototype resource can be found at http://apoptosis-db.org.