Data Resources and Applications

There has been a rapid growth of biology data in the past few years. Their deep studies are important in post genome era and are essential for modern human life, such as importance as drug and fuel resources, disease diagnosis and treatment and as fundamental knowledge for recombinant technology. Considering these applications, database infrastructure for model systems of species deserves much more attention. Study of biological signal transduction, the interconnection between these pathways and systems biology on the whole has in general lagged behind the functional genomic. In this chapter, we review a variety of pathway databases and the resources that are currently available. We highlight trends and challenges in the ongoing efforts to integrate pathway databases and the applications of data analysis in terms of database integration. We also discuss how progress in bioinformatics can serve as an example for the improvement of the pathway database landscape and thereby allow quantitative modeling of biosystems.We propose several feasible and successful database applications as a possible model for collaboration and to ease future integration efforts of signal transduction.