The theme in the NURSA Bioinformatics Resource's Phase II strategy is to enhance the ability of users to derive information from the site that will facilitate research towards improved translational therapies for intervention in the numerous diseases in which nuclear receptors, their coregulators and their ligands are implicated. The NURSA Bioinformatics Resource plays a central role in the realization of the consortium's objectives 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 community resource, dedicated to consolidating legacy and future NURSA data in the nuclear receptor field, and to providing a level of annotation not practicable for larger generic resources. It is, to our knowledge, the only curated resource that integrates primary data with generic information on nuclear receptors, their ligands and coregulators, and is aimed towards building a picture of the complex developmental, physiological and metabolic networks in nuclear receptor and coregulator biology. The NURSA Extranet also facilitates communication between members of the NURSA laboratories, of the Executive Committee, the NURSA Pis and 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 the traditional form of a citable journal article. We now have a successful web publishing paradigm to primary datasets 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 expression analyses, and (iii) proteomic and profiling of coregulator-interacting proteins. In Phase II we aim to further develop 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 Resource maximizes the NURSA nuclear receptor signaling portal for world-wide accessibility and has nearly 25,000 visits/month with an approximately 1:1 ration of new:repeat visitors.
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