HIV Toolbox, an interactive, visual, and customizable HIV Protein Ontology

描述(由申请者提供)：人们对研究艾滋病毒以改进艾滋病大流行的治疗非常感兴趣。随着对这种病原体的研究进入第四个十年，艾滋病毒感染正在成为研究最深入的生物系统之一。人类宿主感染艾滋病毒可以被认为是一个复杂的大系统，就像我们日常与之互动的交通、互联网、社会和经济系统一样。我们认为，就像上述宏观系统一样，我们应该开始整合信息并开发提供信息的工具，以促进将艾滋病毒作为一个系统进行研究，而不是将其作为一个相互隔离的微域的集合。为了开始解决这个问题的一个方面，我们的实验室建立了HIV工具箱，一个关于艾滋病毒蛋白质的数据库和一个开放访问的网络系统，该系统以统一的视图显示这些信息，以促进对艾滋病毒蛋白质序列、结构和功能的研究；网络链接：[http://hivtoolbox.bio-toolkit.com].这一集成的交互式HIVToolbox系统允许可视化地挖掘其他方法不容易揭示的关系，在这些方法中，数据也没有被整合。这种方法对于生成假设、设计实验和解释实验都很有用。HIVToolbox是我们所知的唯一一个网站，它很容易将序列、结构、功能和保守性的数据和坐标显示集成在一个统一的界面中。在过去的1.5年里，HIVToolbox已经达到了广泛的受众，点击量达到了10万次。在这里，我们建议通过实现使用HIVToolbox中的序列、结构、功能和保守信息的新方法来显著扩展的功能。新的HIVToolbox还将能够将药物结合位点与耐药性突变进行比较，以帮助在ARV药物设计中考虑耐药性。我们还将生成一个公共艾滋病毒本体，可用于艾滋病毒生物信息学研究，并将艾滋病毒研究与其他领域联系起来。这种数据结构和表示方法也可以作为研究人类健康和疾病的其他重要方面的模型。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): There is enormous interest in studying HIV to improve the treatment for the AIDS pandemic. As study of the pathogen enters its 4th decade, HIV infection is becoming one of the best-studied biological systems. HIV infection of a human host can be considered a large complex system like the transportation, Internet, social, and economic systems we interact with daily. We contend that like the aforementioned macroscopic systems, we should begin to integrate information and develop tools for presenting the information to facilitate the study of HIV as a system, rather than a collection of segregated microdomains. To begin addressing one aspect of this issue, our laboratory has built HIVToolbox, a database about HIV proteins and an open-access web system that displays this information in a unified view to facilitate the study of HIV protein sequence, structure, and function; weblink: [http://hivtoolbox.bio-toolkit.com]. This integrated, interactive HIVToolbox system allows visual mining of relationships that are not readily revealed by other approaches where data is not integrated as well. This approach is useful for generating hypotheses, experimental design, and interpretation of experiments. HIVToolbox is the only website we know of that readily integrates data and coordinates display of sequence, structure, function, and conservation in a unified interface. HIVToolbox has already reached a wide audience with ~100,000 hits in the last 1.5 years. Here, we propose a significant expansion of the functionality of by implementing new approaches for using sequence, structural, function, and conservation information in HIVToolbox. The new HIVToolbox will also enabling comparison of drug binding sites with drug resistance mutations as an aid to consider drug resistance in ARV drug design. We will also generate a public HIV ontology that can be used for HIV bioinformatics research and connecting HIV research with other fields. This approach to data structure and presentation can also serve as a model for studying other important aspects of human health and disease.