IMEx Databases: Displaying Molecular Interactions into a Single, Standards-Compliant Dataset

Abstract

Molecular interaction databases aim to systematically capture and organize the experimental interaction information described in the scientific literature. These data can then be used to perform network analysis, to assign putative roles to uncharacterized proteins and to investigate their involvement in cellular pathways.This chapter gives a brief overview of publicly available molecular interaction databases and focuses on the members of the IMEx Consortium, on their curation policies and standard data formats. All of the goals achieved by IMEx databases over the last 15 years, the data types provided and the many different ways in which such data can be utilized by the research community, are described in detail. The IMEx databases curate molecular interaction data to the highest caliber, following a detailed curation model and supplying rich metadata by employing common curation rules and harmonized standards. The IMEx Consortium provides comprehensively annotated molecular interaction data integrated into a single, non-redundant, open access dataset.

Keywords: Bioinformatics; Controlled vocabulary; Databases; Manual curation; Molecular interaction data standards; Molecular interactions.