Biological database – Wikipedia
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THE Biological databases are libraries listing information on the life sciences collected through scientific experiences, published literature, high -speed experimental technologies, and computer analyzes.
They contain information from various fields of research such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, phylogenetics and DNA chips. Among the content of the databases, there is information about the function, the structure, the location (cellular and chromosomal) of the genes and the clinical effects of their mutations, as well as their similarities in sequence and structure.
These databases are important tools for scientists because they allow them to understand and explain many biological phenomena ranging from the structure of biomolecules and their interactions to all of the metabolism of organisms, and even the evolution of species. This knowledge facilitates the management of pathologies, allows the creation of new drugs and allows the discovery of inter-species relationships during the history of life.
Knowledge of biology is the subject of all kinds of specialized or general databases. Therefore, it is sometimes difficult to ensure the consistency of information. The purpose of integrative bioinformatics is to solve this problem by offering unified access. The concept of bioinformatics access number makes it possible to link the contents of the different databases between them.
Relational database concepts (coming from IT) and information research (on electronic libraries) are important for understanding biological databases. Their design, development and long -term maintenance is a key sector of bioinformatics. They are often described as semi-structured data, and can come in the form of tables, XML structures, etc.
The newspaper Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) publishes a special edition named every year The Database Issue of NAR [ first ] , which is freely available. It categorizes a large part of the databases in lines accessible to the public in relation to biology and bioinformatics. This edition is accompanied by The Online Molecular Biology Database Collection , a list of 1,380 databases.
There are other database collections, such as Metabase or Bioinformatics Links Collection .
Most organic databases are accessible on websites on which users can browse the information. In general, it is also possible to download data in various formats: text, sequencing data, protein structures or links. For example :
- Information in the form of texts can be provided by PubMed or OMIM,
- Sequencing data is available on Genbank (DNA) and Uniprot (proteins),
- Protein spatial structures are available on the protein data bank, scop and cath.
For certain species, in particular those which are often used for research, there are specialized databases. Colibase [ 2 ] is for example devoted to E. coli . We also find Flybase for the Drosophile, Wormbase for nematodes C. elegans And C. briggsae , Eupathdb for eukaryotic pathogens.
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