Biomolecule and Bioentity Interaction Databases in Systems Biology: A Comprehensive Review

Research output: Contribution to journalReviewResearchpeer-review

  • Fotis A. Baltoumas
  • Sofia Zafeiropoulou
  • Evangelos Karatzas
  • Koutrouli, Mikaela
  • Foteini Thanati
  • Kleanthi Voutsadaki
  • Maria Gkonta
  • Joana Hotova
  • Ioannis Kasionis
  • Pantelis Hatzis
  • Georgios A. Pavlopoulos

Technological advances in high-throughput techniques have resulted in tremendous growth of complex biological datasets providing evidence regarding various biomolecular interactions. To cope with this data flood, computational approaches, web services, and databases have been implemented to deal with issues such as data integration, visualization, exploration, organization, scalability, and complexity. Nevertheless, as the number of such sets increases, it is becoming more and more difficult for an end user to know what the scope and focus of each repository is and how redundant the information between them is. Several repositories have a more general scope, while others focus on specialized aspects, such as specific organisms or biological systems. Unfortunately, many of these databases are self-contained or poorly documented and maintained. For a clearer view, in this article we provide a comprehensive categorization, comparison and evaluation of such repositories for different bioentity interaction types. We discuss most of the publicly available services based on their content, sources of information, data representation methods, user-friendliness, scope and interconnectivity, and we comment on their strengths and weaknesses. We aim for this review to reach a broad readership varying from biomedical beginners to experts and serve as a reference article in the field of Network Biology.

Original languageEnglish
Article number1245
JournalBiomolecules
Volume11
Issue number8
Number of pages41
ISSN2218-273X
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

    Research areas

  • biomedical networks, associations, biological interactions, network biology, databases, data integration, MANUALLY CURATED DATABASE, PROTEIN-PROTEIN INTERACTIONS, GENOMICS DATA SETS, ENRICHMENT ANALYSIS, WEB SERVER, NETWORK ANALYSIS, NONCODING RNAS, INTEGRATIVE ANALYSIS, TOPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS, LIGAND INTERACTIONS

ID: 279259361