<$BlogRSDUrl$> Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
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Monday, August 29, 2005  



EBI and Ghent University Launch PRIDE: An Open Source Database Of Protein Identifications
http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/life_sciences/report-48290.html

The European Bioinformatics Institute and Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB)Ghent University have launched the PRoteomics IDEntifications database (PRIDE; www.ebi.ac.uk/pride). PRIDE allows researchers who work in the field of proteomics the large-scale study of proteins to share information much more readily than was previously possible. This will allow them to exploit the growing mass of information on how the bodys complement of proteins is altered in many disease states, paving the way towards new predictive and diagnostic methods in medicine. Proteomics is the identification and characterization of all the proteins produced by a particular type of cell, tissue or organism under certain conditions. While an individuals genome remains the same from one moment to the next, proteomes are extremely dynamic. For example, the set of proteins produced by your liver will change in response to eating a meal, and a healthy liver produces a different set of proteins than a diseased liver. Proteomics therefore has great potential, not only for helping us to understand how our environment affects the healthy body, but also for understanding disease mechanisms and developing new ways of diagnosing disease. Large international efforts to document all the proteins produced by several tissues, including liver, brain and blood plasma, are now underway. But although the high-throughput identification of proteins is gathering momentum, until recently there was no straightforward means of sharing or comparing the results. Proteomics labs were publishing their protein identifications, explains Henning Hermjakob, leader of the EBIs Proteomics Services Team, but they had no guidelines as what information should be captured or how the information should be formatted. The proteomics community rapidly realized that researchers would only be able to exploit the results of their endeavours if they had a central repository that would allow them to make their results publicly available using agreed data standards. This has been added to Biological Informatics Subject Tracerâ„¢ Information Blog.

posted by Marcus Zillman | 4:15 AM
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