MIDAS - Molecular Interaction Data Availability Standards

对细胞分子相互作用的了解对于了解该细胞的生物学以及它对周围环境变化的反应机制至关重要。多年来，生物学家一直在研究这些相互作用，主要是蛋白质之间的相互作用，但现在扩展到其他类型的分子，并创建了数据库来存储这些信息。通过蛋白质组学标准倡议(PSI)的工作，这些数据库得到了统一，该倡议产生了该领域所有主要参与者都采用的共同交换标准。现在，该领域的研究人员可以将来自不同资源的数据集组合在一起。此外，还编写了许多工具来可视化和分析这些数据，这些工具适用于来自多个不同来源的数据。自2007年以来，数据格式一直保持稳定，但实验方法、数据类型研究和结果数据的复杂性已经发生了变化。现在有必要推进标准，以迎接新的挑战，编写新的工具，或更新成功的现有应用程序，以处理这些升级的格式。开发人员将作为防扩散安全倡议的一部分，与数据制作者、数据用户和工具开发人员协商，以确保更新后的格式符合他们的需要。一旦开发完成，新的格式以及配套的工具套件和可视化资源将被并入两个备受瞩目的英国资源--完整的分子相互作用数据库和Intermine项目，后者为几个重要的模式生物提供了一个开源数据集成平台。将提供一项培训计划，以确保系统生物学社区理解和使用这笔赠款的产出，并将支持负责为网络生物学家提供高质量、非冗余的交互数据集的IMEX联盟的工作。

An understanding of the molecular interactions a cell makes is critical to understanding the biology of that cell, and the mechanisms by which it reacts to a change in its surrounding environment. Biologists have studied these interactions, mainly protein-protein but now extending to other molecule types, for many years and databases were created to store such information. These databases have been united through the work of the Proteomics Standards Initiative (PSI), which produced common interchange standards that were adopted by all the major players in the field. It was now possible for researchers in the field to combine datasets from disparate resources. Additionally many tools were written to visualize and analyze such data and these tools worked for data from multiple different sources.The data formats have been stable since 2007 years but experimental methodologies, data types studies and the complexity of the resulting data has moved on. It is now necessary to advance the standards to meet new challenges and to write novel tools, or update successful existing applications, to work with these upgraded formats. The developers will work as part of the PSI, in consultation with data producers, data users and tool developers to ensure the updated formats meet their needs. Once developed, the new formats and accompanying tool suite and visualization resources will be incorporated into two high profile, UK-based resources - the IntAct molecular interaction data abase and the InterMine project which provides an open-source data integraion platform for several important model organisms. A training program will be delivered to ensure the outputs of this grant are understood and used by the Systems Biology community and the work of the IMEx Consortium, responsible for supplying a high-quality non-redundant set of interaction data for network biologists, will also be supported.