NCATS BioPlanet

NCATS BioPlanet compiles a curated collection of human signaling pathways and analytical resources to support toxicology, systems biology, and chemical genomics investigations.

Key Features:

• Comprehensive Pathway Integration: Includes 1,658 human pathways aggregated from publicly available, manually curated sources and cross-evaluated for redundancy and consistency.
• Pathway retrieval and analysis: Provides pathway retrieval and analysis capabilities to examine pathway connections and gene-component relationships.
• Pathway Search Capabilities: Enables search by gene targets, pathway category, and availability of corresponding bioactivity assays.
• Visualization: Represents pathways on a 3-dimensional globe where distances between pathways reflect the degree of gene component overlap.
• Strategic Assay Identification: Identifies a minimal set of 362 biological assays that collectively interrogate the full collection of human pathways for chemical profiling.

Scientific Applications:

• Chemical genomics: Predict and define impacts of small molecules on biological systems by mapping compound effects to pathways.
• Toxicology: Support molecular-level analysis of potential toxicological effects through pathway-based profiling.
• Systems biology: Enable analysis of complex interactions within cellular signaling networks by integrating pathway relationships.
• Assay-driven compound profiling: Guide selection of assays for efficient compound effect prediction using the identified minimal assay set.

Methodology:

Integrates pathways from multiple publicly available, manually curated databases, performs cross-evaluation to remove redundancy and ensure consistency, represents pathway similarity on a 3-dimensional globe based on gene component overlap, and identifies a minimal set of 362 biological assays covering the pathway collection.