Skip to main content
Premium Trial:

Request an Annual Quote

This Week in Nucleic Acids Research: Oct 25, 2017

Italian researchers introduce the "Disease Network Open Resource," or DISNOR, an open-access site containing information on more than 3,700 disease networks made up of interactions surrounding some 2,600 disease-associated genes. The database brings together associations described in DisGeNET with the help of causal interaction clues in the "Signaling Network Open Resource," better known as SIGNOR. "The present version of DISNOR is the result of our latest curation effort aimed at increasing the coverage of disease genes in the SIGNOR database," the authors write, noting that the team plans to continue curating such associations and welcomes feedback from investigators using the resource.

A team of researchers from University Health Network, University of Toronto, and Ontario Institute of Cancer Research reports on PharmacoDB, a database aimed at integrating pharmacogenomic insights gleaned from anticancer drug screens, cell line descriptions, and chemical compound clues. As of the paper's publication, the site housed information on interactions involving more than 750 compounds, 673 potential drug targets, and nearly 1,700 cell lines, representing 41 tissues — information drawn from more than half a dozen large datasets. The researchers touched on the strategies used to classify and curate the chemical compounds and cell lines to consistently assess drug effects. They say the PharmacoDB site "provides a unique resource to mine a compendium of curated cancer pharmacogenomic datasets that are otherwise disparate and difficult to integrate."

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Michigan, and elsewhere present an online database called EpiDenovo, designed to help spell out the disease and developmental consequences of de novo mutations that alter epigenetic features and gene regulation. The team focused its attention on de novo mutations influencing epigenomic and transcriptomic features of early development and developmental conditions. The study's authors call EpiDenovo "a useful resource for selecting candidate genes for further functional studies in embryonic development, and for investigating regulatory [de novo mutations] as well as other genetic variants causing or underlying development disorders."