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Reactome: a knowledgebase of biological pathways

  1. L. Stein1
  1. 1Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA, 2European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK, 3St Johns University, NY, USA, 4New York University School of Medicine, NY, USA and 5University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
  1. *To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +1 516 367 6904; Fax: +1 516 367 6851; Email: joshi{at}cshl.org

    Abstract

    Reactome, located at http://www.reactome.org is a curated, peer-reviewed resource of human biological processes. Given the genetic makeup of an organism, the complete set of possible reactions constitutes its reactome. The basic unit of the Reactome database is a reaction; reactions are then grouped into causal chains to form pathways. The Reactome data model allows us to represent many diverse processes in the human system, including the pathways of intermediary metabolism, regulatory pathways, and signal transduction, and high-level processes, such as the cell cycle. Reactome provides a qualitative framework, on which quantitative data can be superimposed. Tools have been developed to facilitate custom data entry and annotation by expert biologists, and to allow visualization and exploration of the finished dataset as an interactive process map. Although our primary curational domain is pathways from Homo sapiens, we regularly create electronic projections of human pathways onto other organisms via putative orthologs, thus making Reactome relevant to model organism research communities. The database is publicly available under open source terms, which allows both its content and its software infrastructure to be freely used and redistributed.

    Received August 19, 2004; Revised and Accepted October 6, 2004

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