Skip to main content

Web-Based Resources for Clinical Bioinformatics

  • Protocol
Clinical Bioinformatics

Part of the book series: Methods in Molecular Medicineā„¢ ((MIMM,volume 141))

  • 1197 Accesses

Summary

In the post-Human Genome Project era, awareness of the resources available through the internet is essential to both molecular biologists and clinicians. An overview of the main databases and analytical tools described in this chapter is important to understand the principles upon which hypotheses are generated, experiments are based and conclusions reached. Similarly, an introduction to the terminology of these resources often facilitates their use and adoption into practice. This chapter covers database resources such as NCBI/ Entrez, Ensembl and UCSC as well as analytical tools for sequence alignment, promoter analysis and molecular interactions.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Protocol
USD 49.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Abbreviations

BLAST:

Basic Local Alignment Search Tool

DDBJ:

DNA Data Bank of Japan

EMBL:

European Molecular Biology Laboratory

EST:

Expressed Sequence Tag

NCBI:

National Centre for Biotechnology Information

UCSC:

University of California, Santa Cruz

References

  1. Dayhoff, M. O. (1978) Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure. National Biomedical Research Foundation, Washington D.C.

    Google ScholarĀ 

  2. Baxeveanis, A. D. O., and Ouellette, B. F. F. (eds) (2005) Bioinformatics: A Practical Guide to the Analysis of Genes and Proteins, 3rd ed. Wiley-InterScience, Hoboken, NJ.

    Google ScholarĀ 

  3. Bateman, A. (2006) Editorial, Nucleic Acids Res. 34, Database Issue 1.

    Google ScholarĀ 

  4. Geer, R. C., and Sayers, E. W. (2003) Entrez: making use of its power. Brief Bioinform. 4, 179ā€“184.

    ArticleĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  5. Maglott, D., Ostell, J., Pruitt, K. D., and Tatusova, T. (2005) Entrez gene: gene-centered information at NCBI. Nucleic Acids Res. 33, D54ā€“D58.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  6. Pruitt, K. D., Tatusova, T., and Maglott, D. R. (2003) NCBI reference Sequence project: update and current status. Nucleic Acids Res. 31, 34ā€“37.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  7. Birney, E., Andrews, D., Bevan, P., Caccamo, M., Cameron, G., Chen, Y., et al. (2004) Ensembl 2004. Nucleic Acids Res. 32, D468ā€“D470.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  8. Kent, W. J., Sugnet, C. W., Furey, T. S., Roskin, K. M., Pringle, T. H., Zahler, A. M., et al. (2002) The human genome browser at UCSC. Genome Res. 12, 996ā€“1006.

    CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  9. Openhelix,http://www.openhelix.com/ucscmaterials.shtml.

  10. Safran, M., Chalifa-Caspi, V., Shmueli. O., Olender. T., Lapidot, M., Rosen, N., et al. (2003) Human gene-centric databases at the Weizmann Institute of Science: GeneCards, UDB, CroW 21 and HORDE. Nucleic Acids Res. 31, 142ā€“146.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  11. Rosen, N., Chalifa-Caspi, V., Shmueli, O., Adato, A., Lapidot, M., Stampnitzky, J., et al. (2003) GeneLoc: exon-based integration of human genome maps. Bioinformatics 19(S1), 222ā€“224.

    Google ScholarĀ 

  12. Lenhard, B., Hayes, W. S., and Wasserman, W. W. (2001) GeneLynx: a gene-centric portal to the human genome. Genome Res. 11, 2151ā€“2157.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  13. Gilbert, D. G., (2002) euGenes: a eukaryote genome information system. Nucleic Acids Res. 30, 145ā€“148.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  14. Gribskov, M. R., and Devereux, J. (1991) Sequence analysis primer. UWBC biotechnical resource series, Stockton Press; Macmillan Publishers, New York, xv, 279.

    Google ScholarĀ 

  15. Durbin, R. (1998) Biological sequence analysis: probabalistic models of proteins and nucleic acids, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 356.

    Google ScholarĀ 

  16. Thompson, J. D., Plewniak, F., and Poch, O. (1999) A comprehensive comparison of multiple sequence alignment programs. Nucleic Acids Res. 27, 2682ā€“2690.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  17. Phillips, A., Janies, D., and Wheeler, W. (2000) Multiple sequence alignment in phylogenetic analysis. Mol. Phylogenet. Evol. 16, 317ā€“330.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  18. Baldauf, S. L. (2003) Phylogeny for the faint of heart: a tutorial. Trends Genet. 19, 345ā€“351.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  19. Altschul, S. F., Gish, W., Miller, W., Myers, E. W., and Lipman, D. J. (1990) Basic local alignment search tool. J. Mol. Biol. 215, 403ā€“410.

    CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  20. Altschul, S. F., Madden, T. L., Schaffer, A. A., Zhang, J., Zhang, Z., Miller, W., et al. (1997) Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST: a new generation of protein database search programs. Nucleic Acids Res. 25, 3389ā€“3402.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  21. Schaffer, A. A., Aravind, L., Madden, T. L., Shavirin, S., Spouge, J. L., Wolf, Y. I., et al. (2001) Improving the accuracy of PSI-BLAST protein database searches with composition-based statistics and other refinements. Nucleic Acids Res. 29, 2994ā€“3005.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  22. States, D. J., Gish, W., and Altschul, S. F. (1991) Improved sensitivity of nucleic acid database searches using application-specific scoring matrices. Methods: A Companion to Methods in Enzymology 3, 66ā€“70.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  23. Tatusova, T. A., and Madden, T. L. (1999) BLAST 2 Sequences, a new tool for comparing protein and nucleotide sequences. FEMS Microbiol. Lett. 174, 247ā€“250.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  24. Schwartz, S., Zhang, Z., Frazer, K. A., Smit, A., Riemer, C., Bouck, J., et al. (2000) PipMakerā€”web server for aligning two genomic DNA sequences. Genome Res. 10, 577ā€“586.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  25. Kent, W. J. (2002) BLATā€”the BLAST-like alignment tool. Genome Res. 12, 656ā€“664.

    CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  26. Pertsemlidis, A., and Fondon III, J. W.. (2001) Having a BLAST with bioinformatics (and avoiding BLASTphemy). Genome Biol. 2, Reviews 1ā€“10

    ArticleĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  27. Boutros, P. C. (2005) An Introduction to Effective BLASTing. Hypothesis 3, 26ā€“33.

    Google ScholarĀ 

  28. Liu, X., Noll, D. M., Lieb, J. D., and Clarke, N. D. (2005) DIP-chip: rapid and accurate determination of DNA-binding specificity. Genome Res. 15, 421ā€“427.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  29. Lee, T. I., Rinaldi, N. J., Robert, F., Odom, D. T., Bar-Joseph, Z., Gerber, G. K., et al. (2002) Transcriptional regulatory networks in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Science 298, 799ā€“804.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  30. Ren, B., Robert, F., Wyrick, J. J., Aparicio, O., Jennings, E. G., Simon, I., et al. (2000) Genome-wide location and function of DNA binding proteins. Science 290, 2306ā€“2309.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  31. Frith, M. C., Fu, Y., Yu, L., Chen, J. F., Hansen, U., and Weng, Z. (2004) Detection of functional DNA motifs via statistical over-representation. Nucleic Acids Res. 32, 1372ā€“1381.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  32. Tompa, M., Li, N., Bailey, T. L., Church, G. M., De Moor, B., Eskin, E., et al. (2005) Assessing computational tools for the discovery of transcription factor binding sites. Nat. Biotechnol. 23, 137ā€“144.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  33. Wasserman, W. W., Palumbo, M., Thompson, W., Fickett, J. W., and Lawrence, C. E., (2000) Human-mouse genome comparisons to locate regulatory sites. Nat. Genet. 26, 225ā€“228.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  34. Boutros, P. C., Moffat, I. D., Franc, M. A., Tijet, N., Tuomisto, J., Pohjanvirta, R., et al. (2004) Dioxin-responsive AHRE-II gene battery: identification by phylogenetic footprinting. Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun. 321, 707ā€“715.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  35. Zhu, Z., Pilpel, Y., and Church, G. M. (2002) Computational identification of transcription factor binding sites via a transcription-factor-centric clustering (TFCC) algorithm. J. Mol. Biol. 318, 71ā€“81.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  36. Steffen, M., Petti, A., Aach, J., Dā€™haeseleer, P., and Church, G. (2002) Automated modelling of signal transduction networks. BMC Bioinformatics 3, 34.

    ArticleĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  37. Segal, E., Shapira, M., Regev, A., Peā€™er, D., Botstein, D., Koller, D., et al. (2003) Module networks: identifying regulatory modules and their condition-specific regulators from gene expression data. Nat. Genet. 34, 166ā€“176.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  38. Friedman, N. (2004) Inferring cellular networks using probabilistic graphical models. Science 303, 799ā€“805.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  39. Mwangi, M. M., and Siggia, E. D. (2003) Genome wide identification of regulatory motifs in Bacillus subtilis. BMC Bioinformatics 4, 18.

    ArticleĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  40. Sandelin, A., Alkema, W., Engstrom, P., Wasserman, W. W., and Lenhard, B. (2004) JASPAR: an open-access database for eukaryotic transcription factor binding profiles. Nucleic Acids Res. 32, D91ā€“D94.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  41. Rozen, S., and Skaletsky, H. (2000) Primer3 on the WWW for general users and for biologist programmers. Methods Mol. Biol. 132, 365ā€“386.

    CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  42. Pattyn, F., Speleman, F., De Paepe, A., and Vandesompele, J. (2003) RTPrimerDB: the real-time PCR primer and probe database. Nucleic Acids Res. 31, 122ā€“123.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  43. Lexa, M., Horak, J., and Brzobohaty, B. (2001) Virtual PCR. Bioinformatics 17, 192ā€“193.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  44. Boutros, P. C., and Okey, A. B. (2004) PUNS: transcriptomic- and genomic-in silico PCR for enhanced primer design. Bioinformatics 20, 2399ā€“2400.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  45. Moore, M. J. (2005) From birth to death: the complex lives of eukaryotic mRNAs. Science 309, 1514ā€“1518.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  46. Xie, X., Lu, J., Kulbokas, E. J., Golub, T. R., Mootha, V., Lindblad-Toh, K., et al. (2005) Systematic discovery of regulatory motifs in human promoters and 3ā€™ UTRs by comparison of several mammals. Nature 434, 338ā€“345.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  47. Macke, T. J., Ecker, D. J., Gutell, R. R., Gautheret, D., Case, D. A., and Sampath, R. (2001) RNAMotif, an RNA secondary structure definition and search algorithm. Nucleic Acids Res. 29, 4724ā€“4235.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  48. Tinoco, I., Jr., and Bustamante, C. (1999) How RNA folds. J. Mol. Biol. 293, 271ā€“281.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  49. Major, F., and Griffey, R. (2001) Computational methods for RNA structure determination. Curr. Opin. Struct. Biol. 11, 282ā€“286.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  50. Marchler-Bauer, A., Anderson, J. B., DeWeese-Scott, C., Fedorova, N. D., Geer, L. Y., He, S., et al. (2003) CDD: a curated Entrez database of conserved domain alignments. Nucleic Acids Res. 31, 383ā€“387.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  51. Baker, D., and Sali, A. (2001) Protein structure prediction and structural genomics. Science 294, 93ā€“96.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  52. Meiler, J., and Baker, D. (2003) Coupled prediction of protein secondary and tertiary structure. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U S A 100, 12105ā€“1210.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  53. Aebersold, R., and Mann, M. (2003) Mass spectrometry-based proteomics. Nature 422, 198ā€“207.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  54. Tong, A. H., Drees, B., Nardelli, G., Bader, G. D., Brannetti, B., Castagnoli, L., et al. (2002) A combined experimental and computational strategy to define protein interaction networks for peptide recognition modules. Science 295, 321ā€“324.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  55. Tsoka, S., and Ouzounis, C. A. (2000) Prediction of protein interactions: metabolic enzymes are frequently involved in gene fusion. Nat. Genet. 26, 141ā€“142.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  56. Sharan, R., Suthram, S., Kelley, R. M., Kuhn, T., McCuine, S., Uetz, P., et al. (2005) Conserved patterns of protein interaction in multiple species. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U S A 102, 1974ā€“1979.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  57. Kemmeren, P., van Berkum, N. L., Vilo, J., Bijma, T., Donders, R., Brazma, A., et al. (2002) Protein interaction verification and functional annotation by integrated analysis of genome-scale data. Mol. Cell. 9, 1133ā€“1143.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  58. Huh W. K., Falvo, J. V., Gerke, L. C., Carroll, A. S., Howson, R. W., Weissman, J. S., et al. (2003) Global analysis of protein localization in budding yeast. Nature 425, 686ā€“691.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  59. Jansen, R., Yu, H., Greenbaum, D., Kluger, Y., Krogan, N. J., Chung, S., et al. (2003) Bayesian networks approach for predicting proteinā€“protein interactions from genomic data. Science 302, 449ā€“453.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  60. Mishra, G. R., Suresh, M., Kumaran, K., Kannabiran, N., Suresh, S., Bala, P., et al. (2006) Human protein reference databaseā€”2006 update. Nucleic Acids Res. 34, D411ā€“D414.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  61. Brown, K. R., and Jurisica, I. (2005) Online predicted human interaction database. Bioinformatics 1, 2076ā€“2082.

    ArticleĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  62. Przulj, N., Wigle, D. A., and Jurisica, I. (2004) Functional topology in a network of protein interactions. Bioinformatics 20, 340ā€“348.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  63. Luscombe, N. M., Babu, M. M., Yu, H., Snyder, M., Teichmann, S. A., and Gerstein, M. (2004) Genomic analysis of regulatory network dynamics reveals large topological changes. Nature 431, 308ā€“312.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

  64. Wachi, S., Yoneda., K., and Wu, R. (2005) Interactomeā€“transcriptome analysis reveals the high centrality of genes differentially expressed in lung cancer tissues. Bioinformatics 21, 4205ā€“4208.

    ArticleĀ  CASĀ  PubMedĀ  Google ScholarĀ 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

Ā© 2008 Humana Press, a part of Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

About this protocol

Cite this protocol

Joshua, A.M., Boutros, P.C. (2008). Web-Based Resources for Clinical Bioinformatics. In: Trent, R.J. (eds) Clinical Bioinformatics. Methods in Molecular Medicineā„¢, vol 141. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-60327-148-6_17

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-60327-148-6_17

  • Publisher Name: Humana Press

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-58829-791-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-60327-148-6

  • eBook Packages: Springer Protocols

Publish with us

Policies and ethics