The theme in the NURSA Bioinformatics Resource's Phase II strategy is to enhance the ability of users toderive information from the site that will facilitate research towards improved translational therapies forintervention in the numerous diseases in which nuclear receptors, their coregulators and their ligands areimplicated. The NURSA Bioinformatics Resource plays a central role in the realization of the consortium'sobjectives by designing, testing and deploying software for presenting datasets from NURSA laboratories,and implementing strategies for the curation and presentation of data relevant to nuclear receptor signaling.In Phase I we developed an integrated web publishing and bioinformatics solution for data compilation,storage, curation and presentation. The NURSA web portal is a comprehensive, freely-accessible communityresource, dedicated to consolidating legacy and future NURSA data in the nuclear receptor field, and toproviding a level of annotation not practicable for larger generic resources. It is, to our knowledge, the onlycurated resource that integrates primary data with generic information on nuclear receptors, their ligands andcoregulators, and is aimed towards building a picture of the complex developmental, physiological andmetabolic networks in nuclear receptor and coregulator biology. The NURSA Extranet also facilitatescommunication between members of the NURSA laboratories, of the Executive Committee, the NURSA Pisand the NIH/NIDDK program officer and includes a PubMed-indexed journal, Nuclear Receptor Signaling(NRS), which provides members of the community an opportunity to contribute to the NURSA website in thetraditional form of a citable journal article. We now have a successful web publishing paradigm to primarydatasets which, by their nature, require custom solutions for presentation of the data in a user-mineable way.These include (i) microarray-based transcriptomics, (ii) real-time quantitative PCR based gene expressionanalyses, and (iii) proteomic and profiling of coregulator-interacting proteins. In Phase II we aim to furtherdevelop and expand our suite of software for NURSA applications to (i) siRNA for high-content screenings,(ii) ChlP-Chip assays and (iii) post-translational modification analyses. The Bioinformatics Resourcemaximizes the NURSA nuclear receptor signaling portal for world-wide accessibility and has nearly 25,000visits/month with an approximately 1:1 ration of new:repeat visitors.
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