New Bioinformatics Tools For Analyzing Immunological Data

无论以何种标准衡量，免疫系统都是复杂的。作为系统中组件的数量和它们之间的相互作用

The immune system, by any standard is complex. As the number of components in a system and interactions between components grows, our ability to fully comprehend the system diminishes significantly. Principally, humans in comparison to computers, do poorly in tasks such as memorizing, searching and constructing multi-component, multi-scale images. The need to "free our knowledge" from free text, and place it in a computer system which will memorize our knowledge, allow for easy searching and visualization of our understanding of the immune system is apparent. The use of natural language processing to represent molecular findings from the scientific literature, and the use of network visualization have both made a clear impact across biology. Here, we plan to build a new informatics tool that uses both of these techniques to represent the complex network between cells, immunological processes, secreted cytokines, expressed transcripts, and phosphorylated signaling proteins, called ImuuneXpresso. We will then apply this tool to the multiple type of molecular measurements made throughout this program, to suggest the cellular cause of influenza vaccine non-response. Our tools will be available for beta tested to investigators within this program and released to the general community.