BackgroundOver 200 published studies of more than 30 plant species have reported a role for miRNAs in regulating responses to abiotic stresses. However, data from these individual reports has not been collected into a single database. The lack of a curated database of stress-related miRNAs limits research in this field, and thus a cohesive database system should necessarily be constructed for data deposit and further application.DescriptionPASmiR, a literature-curated and web-accessible database, was developed to provide detailed, searchable descriptions of miRNA molecular regulation in different plant abiotic stresses. PASmiR currently includes data from ~200 published studies, representing 1038 regulatory relationships between 682 miRNAs and 35 abiotic stresses in 33 plant species. PASmiR’s interface allows users to retrieve miRNA-stress regulatory entries by keyword search using plant species, abiotic stress, and miRNA identifier. Each entry upon keyword query contains detailed regulation information for a specific miRNA, including species name, miRNA identifier, stress name, miRNA expression pattern, detection method for miRNA expression, a reference literature, and target gene(s) of the miRNA extracted from the corresponding reference or miRBase. Users can also contribute novel regulatory entries by using a web-based submission page. The PASmiR database is freely accessible from the two URLs of http://hi.ustc.edu.cn:8080/PASmiR, and http://pcsb.ahau.edu.cn:8080/PASmiR.ConclusionThe PASmiR database provides a solid platform for collection, standardization, and searching of miRNA-abiotic stress regulation data in plants. As such this database will be a comprehensive repository for miRNA regulatory mechanisms involved in plant response to abiotic stresses for the plant stress physiology community.

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This paper describes the architecture and several key aspects of FIODBS, an interoperable object-database system developed by Fudan University,P.R. China.First, it presents a common object model, which provides basic 00 features for oid, attribute, method and inheritance ,etc. Then three main interface components of FIODBS are given, where FToolsuite, IOQL and C++ A P I are used to manipulate data from multiple data sources,after which the buffer management and schema translation issues are discussed. 1: IntroductionThe advent of the Information Superhighway has dramatically increased the need for efficient and flexible mechanisms to provide integrated information accesses from multiple heterogeneous and geographically distributed data sources. However, database autonomy and heterogeneity form a severe bottleneck for the development of effective interoperable information systems, and there is a growing demand for tools to maximize the portability , reusability and interoperability of arbitrary computing services while keeping the autonomy of the pre-existing databases.In this respect, methodologies of both object-orientation paradigm and database technology have been adopted and a variety of prototypes have been implemented[l, 2, 31. However, most of these systems were established either by using specific servers or by adding management facilities in data sources. So implementers will be cumbered with the infrastructure modifications of both the integrated system and data sources in order to match each other when the new datasource is added into the system. Furthermore, the response time and system load between global and local data servers would be costly in some situations.In this paper we describe the architecture and several key aspects of FIODBS, an interoperable object-database system under development by Fudan university. The goal of FIODBS is not only to establish a framework for the access of multiple data sources conveniently in every client site, but also to provide APIs for the general database applications. With the popularity of client/server architecture in modern database systems, FIODBS has adopted it, where one client can connect with multiple servers to access their data simultaneously, while one server can provide the corresponding services for multiple clients.