Pathways Database System

Abstract

During the next phase of the Human Genome Project, research will focus on functional studies of attributing functions to genes, their regulatory elements, and other DNA sequences. To facilitate the use of genomic information in such studies, a new modeling perspective is needed to examine and study genome sequences in the context of many kinds of biological information. Pathways are the logical format for modeling and presenting such information in a manner that is familiar to biological researchers. In this paper, we introduce an integrated system, called "Pathways Database System," with a set of software tools for modeling, storing, analyzing, visualizing, and querying biological pathways data at different levels of genetic, molecular, biochemical and organismal detail.