Search Functionality Intended for Medical Research in a Bioresource Database
Mika Nagahora
,
National Institute of Genetics, Mishima, Japan
Haruka Kouyama
,
National Institute of Genetics, Mishima, Japan
Tohru Watanabe
,
National Institute of Genetics, Mishima, Japan
Hiroki Watanabe
,
National Institute of Genetics, Mishima, Japan
Gaku Kimura
,
National Institute of Genetics, Mishima, Japan
Yukiko Yamazaki
,
National Institute of Genetics, Mishima, Japan
BioResource World (BRW) is a biological resources portal site and comprises of information from 39 groups which are participants of Japan’s National BioResource Project (NBRP). BRW contains a wide range of taxon groups (animals, plants and microbes). At present, there are 6.5 million resources ranging from wild species to clones. BRW offers services for users to cross-search for biological resources of all species. In recent years, in order to provide added value to resources, we have been developing Research Resource Circulation (RRC), a database which holds information on publications based on researches which utilized NRBP resources. RRC is registered with PubMed’s LinkOut to provide easy access to resources.
Recently, we have been putting a lot of effort into mapping resources with Disease Ontology (DO) in attempts to make the resources more searchable for medical research. Genes directly related to the resource are mapped to DO through databases such as OMIM (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man), homologene, DictyBase, WormBase and FlyBase. Furthermore, MeSH terms can also be utilized now and we were able to make good progress with DO mapping.
Although the accuracy of the search results might not be fully optimized yet, by increasing the number of resources searchable through disease names or including plant resources in the search results, we hope to bring new possibilities to these resources.
