The IMEx Consortium (www.imexconsortium.org/) is an international collaboration between major public interaction data providers which captures experimental data through literature curation and deposition by bench scientists. IMEx member databases share and coordinate their curation efforts, using a central registry (IMExCentral: https://imexcentral.org/icentral/) to manage the selection of articles in order to provide a single, non-redundant, consistently-annotated set of protein interactions. In contrast to other currently active interaction databases, IMEx curators follow a detailed curation model which captures information on experimental methods and biologically important details such as essential binding regions and post-translational modifications, as well as mutations and their effect on protein interactions. This allows downstream users to analyze protein interaction networks and their regulation in normal and disease states. In this proposal we seek support for the continuation and extension of IMEx activities related to the curation and provision of interaction data with special emphasis on human interactome. Over the next five years, we will (1) augment the IMEx interaction dataset by curating information from at least 4000 new publications, providing tens of thousands of human protein interactions; (2) disseminate new and existing IMEx interaction records through a new, consortium-wide IMEx Protein Interaction Resource, which will include an interactive web site, a standards-compliant PSICQUIC web-service and ftp download site (customized subsets of the data will be provided to our long term collaborators, Reactome, UniProtKB and GO Consortium); (3) provide training for existing and new user communities on the use of protein interaction data and network analysis of cancer-related `big data'.
The IMEx Consortium provides biomedical researchers with a comprehensive, fully open access database of protein interactions. Towards this goal consortium curators convert free-text description of experiments demonstrating protein interactions into well-organized database records. The data collected by the IMEx Consortium curators contribute both directly and indirectly to a large number of basic and translational research studies, including analysis of large scale disease-related datasets that will ultimately lead to better understanding of the molecular mechanisms of human diseases and to design of effective, individualized therapies.
| Ding, Yi; Colozza, Gabriele; Sosa, Eric A et al. (2018) Bighead is a Wnt antagonist secreted by the Xenopus Spemann organizer that promotes Lrp6 endocytosis. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 115:E9135-E9144 |
