Using ontologies in integrative tools for protozoan parasite research
Abstract:
Protozoan parasites such as those that cause malaria and toxoplasmosis remain major threats to global health, and a significant biodefense concern. Current treatments are limited and sometimes compromised by acquired resistance. Solutions will come from the integration and mining of ongoing research. The need for data integration is common among research communities tackling complex topics such as the biology of eukaryotic pathogens, their interaction with hosts, and the search for druggable targets and vaccine candidates. Biomedical researchers have greatly benefited from the Gene Ontology (GO) that provides standardized terms for annotating protein function, location, and participation in processes. GO and other relevant ontologies have largely been developed to support human and model organism biology with only limited representation of protozoan parasite biology. In addition, the availability and use of standard terms is also very limited for the inputs and outputs of bioinformatic tools that are commonly used to analyze protozoan parasite datasets and is a barrier for linking these tools together. In the Integrative Tools for Protozoan Parasite Research (ITPPR) project, we have started addressing these areas by developing tools needed by the communities served by EuPathDB (http://eupathdb.org/). We are using ontology-based models as part of our process to build tools for collecting information on isolates, describing phenotypic outcomes of transgenic parasites, and for joining web services running sequence similarity and alignment analysis. Ontologies are drawn from the OBO Foundry and include the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) and OBI (Ontology for Biomedical Investigations).
Topic: NCBO Webinar Series
Date: Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Time: 10:00 am, Pacific Daylight Time (San Francisco, GMT-07:00)
That’s the Wednesday following this post.
An area where integration of data can make a difference.