title: Novel developments of the MetaCrop information system for facilitating systems biological approaches.
abstract: Crop plants play a major role in human and animal nutrition and increasingly contribute to chemical or pharmaceutical industry and renewable resources. In order to achieve important goals, such as the improvement of growth or yield, it is indispensable to understand biological processes on a detailed level. Therefore, the well-structured management of fine-grained information about metabolic pathways is of high interest. Thus, we developed the MetaCrop information system, a manually curated repository of high quality information concerning the metabolism of crop plants. However, the data access to and flexible export of information of MetaCrop in standard exchange formats had to be improved. To automate and accelerate the data access we designed a set of web services to be integrated into external software. These web services have already been used by an add-on for the visualisation toolkit VANTED. Furthermore, we developed an export feature for the MetaCrop web interface, thus enabling the user to compose individual metabolic models using SBML.
authors.affiliation: Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research, Corrensstr 3, 06466 Gatersleben, Germany.
authors.forename: Klaus
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hippe
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Colmsee
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Czauderna
authors.forename: Eva
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Grafahrend-Belau
authors.forename: Björn H
authors.initials: BH
authors.lastname: Junker
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Klukas
authors.forename: Uwe
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Scholz
authors.forename: Falk
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Schreiber
authors.forename: Stephan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Weise
mesh_terms: D018556:Crops, Agricultural / Q000378:metabolism*; D007256:Information Systems; D020407:Internet; D012984:Software; D049490:Systems Biology / Q000379:methods*