[BiO BB] New version of Reactome knowledgebase released

[Reactome-Knowledgebase at reactome.org]

Version 21 of the Reactome Knowledgebase has been released and is accessible at http://www.reactome.org.

Reactome is a curated knowledgebase developed and maintained by the Reactome Knowledgebase team (Lincoln Stein's group at CSHL and Ewan Birney's group at European Bioinformatics Institute). Reactome covers human biological processes ranging from basic pathways of metabolism to complex events such as hormonal signaling and apoptosis. The information in Reactome is provided by expert bench biologists, and edited and managed as a relational database by the Reactome staff. New material is peer-reviewed and revised as necessary before publication to the web. Reactome entries are linked to corresponding ones in NCBI, Entrez Gene, RefSeq, OMIM, Ensembl genome annotations, HapMap, UCSC Genome Browser, KEGG, ChEBI and Gene Ontology (GO).

The web interface allows users to view the curated annotations of human biological processes and orthology-based electronic inferences from these annotations for 22 other species).

New topics released in Version 21 include the Rho GTPase cycle, Wnt regulation of beta-catenin, gap junction turnover, pathways for steroid hormone biosynthesis, metabolism of bile acids and bile salts and snRNP assembly. An outline of the entire influenza virus infection cycle has been completed. Updated release statistics and the Editorial Calendar are available.

Reactome data can be exported in SMBL, Protégé, and BioPAX level 2 formats. Like everything in Reactome, these downloaded and exported materials can be reused and redistributed freely.

A description of Reactome was published in March, 2007, in Genome Biology; the PDF version is available here: http://genomebiology.com/2007/8/3/r39.

Reactome is seeking expert help for the curation of new modules. The Reactome knowledgebase relies on collaborations with research biologists to construct expert consensus views of key biological processes, and to integrate these with other processes already in Reactome. We are seeking new author-collaborators. If you're interested, or would like more information about our data acquisition process, please contact us at editorial at reactome.org.

For questions and comments please reply to this message or write to help at reactome.org.