TRANSPATH®: an information resource for storing and visualizing signaling pathways and their pathological aberrations

TRANSPATH® is a database about signal transduction events. It provides information about signaling molecules, their reactions and the pathways these reactions constitute. The representation of signaling molecules is organized in a number of orthogonal hierarchies reflecting the classification of the molecules, their species-specific or generic features, and their post-translational modifications. Reactions are similarly hierarchically organized in a three-layer architecture, differentiating between reactions that are evidenced by individual publications, generalizations of these reactions to construct species-independent ‘reference pathways’ and the ‘semantic projections’ of these pathways. A number of search and browse options allow easy access to the database contents, which can be visualized with the tool PathwayBuilder™. The module PathoSign adds data about pathologically relevant mutations in signaling components, including their genotypes and phenotypes. TRANSPATH® and PathoSign can be used as encyclopaedia, in the educational process, for vizualization and modeling of signal transduction networks and for the analysis of gene expression data. TRANSPATH® Public 6.0 is freely accessible for users from non-profit organizations under http://www.gene-regulation.com/pub/databases.html.