Curating the innate immunity interactome.
BACKGROUND
The innate immune response is the first line of defence against invading pathogens and is regulated by complex signalling and transcriptional networks. Systems biology approaches promise to shed new light on the regulation of innate immunity through the analysis and modelling of these networks. A key initial step in this process is the contextual cataloguing of the components of this system and the molecular interactions that comprise these networks. InnateDB (http://www.innatedb.com) is a molecular interaction and pathway database developed to facilitate systems-level analyses of innate immunity.


RESULTS
Here, we describe the InnateDB curation project, which is manually annotating the human and mouse innate immunity interactome in rich contextual detail, and present our novel curation software system, which has been developed to ensure interactions are curated in a highly accurate and data-standards compliant manner. To date, over 13,000 interactions (protein, DNA and RNA) have been curated from the biomedical literature. Here, we present data, illustrating how InnateDB curation of the innate immunity interactome has greatly enhanced network and pathway annotation available for systems-level analysis and discuss the challenges that face such curation efforts. Significantly, we provide several lines of evidence that analysis of the innate immunity interactome has the potential to identify novel signalling, transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulators of innate immunity. Additionally, these analyses also provide insight into the cross-talk between innate immunity pathways and other biological processes, such as adaptive immunity, cancer and diabetes, and intriguingly, suggests links to other pathways, which as yet, have not been implicated in the innate immune response.


CONCLUSIONS
In summary, curation of the InnateDB interactome provides a wealth of information to enable systems-level analysis of innate immunity.
Lynn
David J
DJ
Animal & Bioscience Research Department, AGRIC, Teagasc, Grange, Dunsany, Co. Meath, Ireland. david.lynn@teagasc.ie
Chan
Calvin
C
Naseer
Misbah
M
Yau
Melissa
M
Lo
Raymond
R
Sribnaia
Anastasia
A
Ring
Giselle
G
Que
Jaimmie
J
Wee
Kathleen
K
Winsor
Geoffrey L
GL
Laird
Matthew R
MR
Breuer
Karin
K
Foroushani
Amir K
AK
Brinkman
Fiona S L
FS
Hancock
Robert E W
RE
D000818:Animals; D016208:Databases, Factual; D006801:Humans; D007113:Immunity, Innate; D051379:Mice; D035683:MicroRNAs / Q000235:genetics; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D009928:Organ Specificity; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D011506:Proteins / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012984:Software; D049490:Systems Biology / Q000379:methods*; D014158:Transcription, Genetic
D035683:MicroRNAs; D011506:Proteins