BrainBase: A Curated Knowledgebase for Brain Diseases
Recently, researchers from the Beijing Institute of Genomics of Chinese Academy of Sciences / China National Center for Bioinformation have constructed a knowledgebase for brain diseases——BrainBase. This work was published with the title "BrainBase: a curated knowledgebase for brain diseases" in the journal Nucleic Acids Research.
Brain is the central organ of the nervous system and brain diseases can seriously affect human health. Nowadays, increasing brain-related projects have been launched throughout the world, e.g. Human Brain Project in Europe, BRAIN Initiative in US, Brain/MINDS in Japan, China Brain Project, etc., with the aim to deepen our understanding of brain diseases, structure and function and to accelerate brain-derived applications in health, computing, and technology. To provide a whole picture of brain diseases and associated genes, the research group of the National Genomics Data Center developed BrainBase.
Based on manual curation of 2768 published articles along with information retrieval from several public databases, the current version features comprehensive collection of 7175 disease-gene associations spanning a total of 123 brain diseases and linking with 5662 genes, 16 591 drug-target interactions covering 2118 drugs/chemicals and 623 genes, and five types of specific genes in light of expression specificity in brain tissue/regions/cerebrospinal fluid/cells. In addition, considering the severity of glioma among brain tumors, BrainBase incorporates 21 multi-omics datasets, presents molecular profiles across various samples/conditions and identifies four groups of glioma featured genes with potential clinical significance. Moreover, it provides user-friendly web interfaces to facilitate data retrieval and visualization. Collectively, BrainBase bears great promise to serve as a valuable knowledgebase for uncovering molecular mechanisms underlying the progression of brain diseases.
Contents and features of BrainBase (Image by ZHANG Zhang' s group)
Contact:
Dr. Ma Lina
Email: malina@big.ac.cn
Dr. ZHANG Zhang
Email: zhangzhang@big.ac.cn
