Integrating biological databases in the context of transcriptional regulatory networks

Abstract

Several studies show that biological knowledge is growing at a continuous rate and distributed among different databases, making the process of data integration a hard task to perform, because they have different structures, different ways of storing data and also different approaches to export information, and are usually developed to provide information for a specific organism. Due to the large amount of biological data, the process of data integration has been one of the major challenges in the field of bioinformatics as well as discovering information about Transcriptional Regulatory Networks (TRN). When using a single source, this task is not easy to perform since the source often lacks enough information for the successful completion of the task. Therefore it is necessary to find information in several databases in order to create a useful body of knowledge. This work presents a new approach of integrating data related with TRNs for the Escherichia coli by creating a new integrated data repository gathering information from KEGG, EcoCyc, Regulon and NCBI databases.