The Genome Sequence DataBase (GSDB): improving data quality and data access

Human gene and disease associations for clinical-genomics and precision medicine research

We are entering the era of personalized medicine in which an individual's genetic makeup will eventually determine how a doctor can tailor his or her therapy. Therefore, it is becoming critical to understand the genetic basis of common diseases, for example, which genes predispose and rare genetic variants contribute to diseases, and so on. Our study focuses on helping researchers, medical practitioners, and pharmacists in having a broad view of genetic variants that may be implicated in the likelihood of developing certain diseases. Our focus here is to create a comprehensive database with mobile access to all available, authentic and actionable genes, SNPs, and classified diseases and drugs collected from different clinical and genomics databases worldwide, including Ensembl, GenCode, ClinVar, GeneCards, DISEASES, HGMD, OMIM, GTR, CNVD, Novoseek, Swiss-Prot, LncRNADisease, Orphanet, GWAS Catalog, SwissVar, COSMIC, WHO, and FDA. We present a new cutting-edge gene-SNP-disease-drug mobile database with a smart phone application, integrating information about classified diseases and related genes, germline and somatic mutations, and drugs. Its database includes over 59 000 protein-coding and noncoding genes; over 67 000 germline SNPs and over a million somatic mutations reported for over 19 000 protein-coding genes located in over 1000 regions, published with over 3000 articles in over 415 journals available at the PUBMED; over 80 000 ICDs; over 123 000 NDCs; and over 100 000 classified gene-SNP-disease associations. We present an application that can provide new insights into the information about genetic basis of human complex diseases and contribute to assimilating genomic with phenotypic data for the availability of gene-based designer drugs, precise targeting of molecular fingerprints for tumor, appropriate drug therapy, predicting individual susceptibility to disease, diagnosis, and treatment of rare illnesses are all a few of the many transformations expected in the decade to come.

Semantic Web technologies for the big data in life sciences

The life sciences field is entering an era of big data with the breakthroughs of science and technology. More and more big data-related projects and activities are being performed in the world. Life sciences data generated by new technologies are continuing to grow in not only size but also variety and complexity, with great speed. To ensure that big data has a major influence in the life sciences, comprehensive data analysis across multiple data sources and even across disciplines is indispensable. The increasing volume of data and the heterogeneous, complex varieties of data are two principal issues mainly discussed in life science informatics. The ever-evolving next-generation Web, characterized as the Semantic Web, is an extension of the current Web, aiming to provide information for not only humans but also computers to semantically process large-scale data. The paper presents a survey of big data in life sciences, big data related projects and Semantic Web technologies. The paper introduces the main Semantic Web technologies and their current situation, and provides a detailed analysis of how Semantic Web technologies address the heterogeneous variety of life sciences big data. The paper helps to understand the role of Semantic Web technologies in the big data era and how they provide a promising solution for the big data in life sciences.

The genome sequence DataBase

The Genome Sequence DataBase (GSDB) is a database of publicly available nucleotide sequences and their associated biological and bibliographic information. Several notable changes have occurred in the past year: GSDB stopped accepting data submissions from researchers; ownership of data submitted to GSDB was transferred to GenBank; sequence analysis capabilities were expanded to include Smith-Waterman and Frame Search; and Sequence Viewer became available to Mac users. The content of GSDB remains up-to-date because publicly available data is acquired from the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration databases (IC) on a nightly basis. This allows GSDB to continue providing researchers with the ability to analyze, query and retrieve nucleotide sequences in the database. GSDB and its related tools are freely accessible from the URL: http://www.ncgr.org

Future vision of the GDB human genome database

In 1973, scientists assembled at the first Human Gene Mapping Workshop to discuss the 64 human genes mapped at that time. In 1989, the GDB Human Genome Database was created to store information on 1, 700 mapped human genes. Ten years later, as the human genome project closes in on the release of the complete DNA sequence holding as many as 100,000 human genes, GDB is evolving to continue to meet the needs of the scientific community. Well known as a resource for data which has been stringently reviewed as part of the curation process, GDB prepares to continue to provide a compilation of the human genome including maps, map objects, polymorphisms, and mutations. As more sites across the Internet are established to share biological information, it becomes increasingly burdensome for the scientist to collect data from all sources of a particular domain. In an attempt to reduce this burden, GDB continues to load data from large genome centres and accept submissions from researchers around the world. Moreover, GDB looks to provide a mechanism to link gene-related information to the human reference sequence. In doing this, GDB plans to establish federated linkages with "boutique" databases around the world that could contain enormous amounts of valuable information about specific genes or chromosomes.

Genetic information resources: a new field for medical librarians

The Human Genome Project is generating unprecedented quantities of new genetic information. The new discipline of bioinformatics has created many new molecular biology databanks to store the results of the Human Genome Project. This data is expected to be the information source for biomedical science in the 21st century. As molecular biology research moves out of the laboratory and becomes molecular medicine, a growing number of people need access to genetic information. Medical students, healthcare practitioners and patients need help in finding appropriate information. Medical librarians should know how to search key genetic information resources and should have a basic understanding of the type of information contained in each.

The Genome Sequence DataBase: towards an integrated functional genomics resource

During 1998 the primary focus of the Genome Sequence DataBase (GSDB; http://www.ncgr.org/gsdb ) located at the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR) has been to improve data quality, improve data collections, and provide new methods and tools to access and analyze data. Data quality has been improved by extensive curation of certain data fields necessary for maintaining data collections and for using certain tools. Data quality has also been increased by improvements to the suite of programs that import data from the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (IC). The Sequence Tag Alignment and Consensus Knowledgebase (STACK), a database of human expressed gene sequences developed by the South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI), became available within the last year, allowing public access to this valuable resource of expressed sequences. Data access was improved by the addition of the Sequence Viewer, a platform-independent graphical viewer for GSDB sequence data. This tool has also been integrated with other searching and data retrieval tools. A BLAST homology search service was also made available, allowing researchers to search all of the data, including the unique data, that are available from GSDB. These improvements are designed to make GSDB more accessible to users, extend the rich searching capability already present in GSDB, and to facilitate the transition to an integrated system containing many different types of biological data.

GXD: a gene expression database for the laboratory mouse. The Gene Expression Database Group

The Gene Expression Database (GXD) is a community resource that stores and integrates expression information for the laboratory mouse, with a particular emphasis on mouse development, and makes these data freely available in formats appropriate for comprehensive analysis. GXD is implemented as a relational database and integrated with the Mouse Genome Database (MGD) to enable global analysis of genotype, expression and phenotype information. Interconnections with sequence databases and with databases from other species further extend GXD's utility for the analysis of gene expression data. GXD is available through the Mouse Genome Informatics Web Site at http://www.informatics.jax.org/