Increasingly, scientists have begun to tackle gene functions and other complex regulatory processes by studying organisms at the global scales for various levels of biological organization, ranging from genomes to metabolomes and physiomes. Meanwhile, new bioinformatics methods have been developed for inferring protein function using associative analysis of functional properties to complement the traditional sequence homology-based methods. To fully exploit the value of the high-throughput system biology data and to facilitate protein functional studies requires bioinformatics infrastructures that support both data integration and associative analysis. The iProClass database, designed to serve as a framework for data integration in a distributed networking environment, provides comprehensive descriptions of all proteins, with rich links to over 50 databases of protein family, function, pathway, interaction, modification, structure, genome, ontology, literature, and taxonomy. In partic...
Cathy H. Wu, Hongzhan Huang, Anastasia N. Nikolska