A Public Database Resource for Apoptosis Research and Education

细胞凋亡（程序性细胞死亡）研究是目前世界范围内生物医学研究中增长最快的三个主题之一。 细胞凋亡在多种正常生理过程中起着关键作用。 正在积累关于复杂的细胞凋亡途径的重要数据和知识，但没有资源可以适当地整理这些信息用于教育和研究目的。 随着实验数据的快速增长，冗余研究的问题也越来越多，如相互冲突的命名法和独立小组对相同蛋白质的多次重新发现。该项目通过提供一个公共的，基于WEB的资源，汇集了所有关于细胞凋亡及其相关蛋白质的信息，帮助快速增长的细胞凋亡研究社区。 特别是，该资源将包含一个可搜索的数据库，其中包含以下信息：-参与细胞凋亡的蛋白质家族，包括它们的结构域结构，系统发育关系和功能基序。链接到描述所有蛋白质功能细节的特定实验的文献。凋亡相关蛋白的三维结构（或预测结构）。未鉴定的蛋白质列表，其结构域在细胞凋亡中的作用是已知的。领先的细胞凋亡研究人员的专业知识被用来开发数据库的初步版本，然后通过自动化的方法来寻找新的序列，结构和出现在各种互联网可访问的资源中与细胞凋亡相关的文本信息。 一旦实施，这些尽可能自动化收集当前的，良好的注释数据细胞凋亡的全球用户社区。 此外，根据序列进行结构和功能预测的新型算法用于增强现有信息，并提供有关细胞凋亡相关蛋白质结构和功能分子机制的假设，帮助计划和开发新实验。 因此，该项目为快速增长的细胞凋亡研究社区提供了一个获得一致完整和最新数据的途径。 原型资源可以在http://apoptosis-db.org上找到。

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.