Title
A computational platform to maintain and migrate manual functional annotations for BioCyc databases
Campus Units
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Genetics, Development and Cell Biology, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Document Type
Article
Publication Version
Published Version
Publication Date
2014
Journal or Book Title
BMC Systems Biology
Volume
8
First Page
115
DOI
10.1186/s12918-014-0115-1
Abstract
Background
BioCyc databases are an important resource for information on biological pathways and genomic data. Such databases represent the accumulation of biological data, some of which has been manually curated from literature. An essential feature of these databases is the continuing data integration as new knowledge is discovered. As functional annotations are improved, scalable methods are needed for curators to manage annotations without detailed knowledge of the specific design of the BioCyc database.
Results
We have developed CycTools, a software tool which allows curators to maintain functional annotations in a model organism database. This tool builds on existing software to improve and simplify annotation data imports of user provided data into BioCyc databases. Additionally, CycTools automatically resolves synonyms and alternate identifiers contained within the database into the appropriate internal identifiers.
Conclusions
Automating steps in the manual data entry process can improve curation efforts for major biological databases. The functionality of CycTools is demonstrated by transferring GO term annotations from MaizeCyc to matching proteins in CornCyc, both maize metabolic pathway databases available at MaizeGDB, and by creating strain specific databases for metabolic engineering.
Rights
Works produced by employees of the U.S. Government as part of their official duties are not copyrighted within the U.S. The content of this document is not copyrighted.
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Walsh, Jesse R.; Sen, Taner Z.; and Dickerson, Julie, "A computational platform to maintain and migrate manual functional annotations for BioCyc databases" (2014). Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications. 77.
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ece_pubs/77
Included in
Bioinformatics Commons, Computational Biology Commons, Systems and Communications Commons, Systems Biology Commons
Comments
This article is from BMC Systems Biology 8 (2014): 115, doi:10.1186/s12918-014-0115-1.