ConsensusPathDB: toward a more complete picture of cell biology.

ConsensusPathDB is a meta-database that integrates different types of functional interactions from heterogeneous interaction data resources. Physical protein interactions, metabolic and signaling reactions and gene regulatory interactions are integrated in a seamless functional association network that simultaneously describes multiple functional aspects of genes, proteins, complexes, metabolites, etc. With 155,432 human, 194,480 yeast and 13,648 mouse complex functional interactions (originating from 18 databases on human and eight databases on yeast and mouse interactions each), ConsensusPathDB currently constitutes the most comprehensive publicly available interaction repository for these species. The Web interface at http://cpdb.molgen.mpg.de offers different ways of utilizing these integrated interaction data, in particular with tools for visualization, analysis and interpretation of high-throughput expression data in the light of functional interactions and biological pathways.

Evidence mining and novelty assessment of protein-protein interactions with the ConsensusPathDB plugin for Cytoscape.

SUMMARY: Protein-protein interaction detection methods are applied on a daily basis by molecular biologists worldwide. After generating a set of potential interactions, biologists face the problem of highlighting the ones that are novel and collecting evidence with respect to literature and annotation. This task can be as tedious as searching for every predicted interaction in several interaction data repositories, or manually screening the scientific literature. To facilitate the task of evidence mining and novelty assessment of protein-protein interactions, we have developed a Cytoscape plugin that automatically mines publication references, database references, interaction detection method descriptions and pathway annotation for a user-supplied network of interactions. The basis for the annotation is ConsensusPathDB-a meta-database that integrates numerous protein-protein, signaling, metabolic and gene regulatory interaction repositories for currently three species: Homo sapiens, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Mus musculus. AVAILABILITY: The ConsensusPathDB plugin for Cytoscape (version 2.7.0 or later) can be installed within Cytoscape on a major operating system (Windows, Mac OS, Unix/Linux) with Sun Java 1.5 or later installed through Cytoscape's Plugin manager (category 'Network and Attribute I/O'). The plugin is freely available for download on the ConsensusPathDB web site (http://cpdb.molgen.mpg.de). SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.