The Pharmacogenetics Knowledge Base (PharmGKB; http://www.pharmgkb.org/) contains genomic, phenotype and clinical information collected from ongoing pharmacogenetic studies. Tools to browse, query, download, submit, edit and process the information are available to registered research network members. A subset of the tools is publicly available. PharmGKB currently contains over 150 genes under study, 14 Coriell populations and a large ontology of pharmacogenetics concepts. The pharmacogenetic concepts and the experimental data are interconnected by a set of relations to form a knowledge base of information for pharmacogenetic researchers. The information in PharmGKB, and its associated tools for processing that information, are tailored for leading-edge pharmacogenetics research. The PharmGKB project was initiated in April 2000 and the first version of the knowledge base went online in February 2001.
A Psychomanteum Process involving mirror-gazing was conducted in a research setting to explore apparent facilitated contact with deceased friends and relatives, and to collect data on the phenomena, experiences, and effects on bereavement. A pilot study with five participants resulted in strong experiences and four apparent contacts. The main study took 27 participants through a three-stage process: remembering a deceased friend or relative, sitting in a darkened room gazing into a mirror while thinking of the person, and finally discussing and reflecting on the experience. Data were collected with pre- and post-questionnaires, a follow-up questionnaire at least four weeks after the session, interviews by the facilitators, and two personality measures, the Tellegen Absorption Scale and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Contacts with the sought person were reported by 13 participants. Participants reported that a variety of imagery appeared in the mirror, as well as experiences of dialogue, sounds, light, body sensations, and smell. Several specific messages were reported by participants who believed that they were from the sought persons. Twenty-one self-report items relating to bereavement were analyzed for changes between pre- and follow-up questionnaires. Using a Wilcoxon signed ranks analysis, statistically significant reductions in bereavement responses were found over the entire group ( p=.05 to .0008). These included unresolved feelings, loss, grief, guilt, sadness, and need to communicate. Participants also reported significant impact on their lives following the session.
Research directed toward discovering how genetic factors influence a patient's response to drugs requires coordination of data produced from laboratory experiments, computational methods, and clinical studies. A public repository of pharmacogenetic data should accelerate progress in the field of pharmacogenetics by organizing and disseminating public datasets. We are developing a pharmacogenetics knowledge base (PharmGKB) to support the storage and retrieval of both experimental data and conceptual knowledge. PharmGKB is an Internetbased resource that integrates complex biological, pharmacological, and clinical data in such a way that researchers can submit their data and users can retrieve information to investigate genotype-phenotype correlations. Successful management of the names, meaning, and organization of concepts used within the system is crucial. We have selected a frame-based knowledge-representation system for development of an ontology of concepts and relationships that represent the domain and that permit storage of experimental data. Preliminary experience shows that the ontology we have developed for gene-sequence data allows us to accept, store, and query data submissions.
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