Databases and Systems

Introduction
9 SENSELAB: MODELING
HETEROGENOUS DATA ON THE
NERVOUS SYSTEM
Prakash Nadkarni¹, Jason Mirsky², Emmanouil
Skoufos¹,² Matthew Healy³, Michael Hines²,
Perry Miller¹ and Gordon Shepherd 2
¹Center for Medical Informatics, Yale University School of
Medicine, New Haven, CT
²Department of Neurobiology, Yale University School of
Medicine, New Haven, CT
³Research Division, Bristol-Myers-Squibb Pharmaceutical
Corporation, Wallingford, CT
Knowledge about the nervous systems (NS) of higher organisms is evolving rapidly,
and databases that store this information will become valuable research resources.
The growth of knowledge is occurring in multiple dimensions, with advances at the
molecular/sequence level matched by discoveries in gene / gene product influence
and interaction. The molecular/functional data must be correlated with corresponding
data at the gross anatomical or pharmacological level, such as
neurotransmitter/receptor distribution, or the locations where the axons of particular
neurons project.
This proliferation of knowledge poses interesting informatics challenges. During
the course of the SENSELAB project (1, 2), which has been funded through the
Human Brain Project (3)), our group has dealt with the problem of representing
several kinds of data, through creation of multiple, physically independent databases.
We briefly summarize this work to indicate the nature and scope of the data involved.
A Web-accessible database (ORDB) of olfactory receptor sequences. Both
amino acid and nucleotide sequences are represented, and some sequences have
associated 3-D structural information in PDB format.This work, previously
described in (4), was done by Matthew Healy, Michael Singer, Jason Smith and
Emmanouil Skoufos. The need for ORDB was suggested by Doron Lancet of the
Weizmann Institute, Israel.