Reactome Explores Biological Processes

Courtesy of http://www.reactome.org

Reactome, a new knowledgebase of human biological processes, launched on June 2 http://www.reactome.org. An NIH-funded collaboration between Lincoln Stein's lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CHSL), NY, and Ewan Birney's lab at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), Hinxton, UK, the Reactome supersedes an earlier project called the Genome Knowledgebase.

Flexible searching tools allow users to explore biological processes and pathways in a variety of ways. A description of each biological event is accompanied by details of the molecules involved, the cellular location, links to preceding events, and equivalent events in other organisms.

"Traditionally, researchers have had to use different databases to find information on the various types of building blocks in pathways," explains Stein. "Reactome is an important breakthrough because it allows researchers to focus on entire processes."

Reactome's information, which comes from biologists who are experts on a particular pathway, is managed by groups of...