About CSB.DB
The About CSB.DB page will give you a first insight into the Comprehensive Systems-Biology Database and provide some basic backgrounds about ideas and concepts of CSB.DB and the underlying comprehensive systems biology project.
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The Comprehensive Systems Biology (CSB) ProjectThe main focus of the CSB project is the generation of new easily accessible knowledge about the relationship and the hierarchy of cellular components. Thus new progress towards understanding life’s complexity pyramid is made. For this aim statistical and computational algorithms are applied to organism specific data derived from publicly available multi-parallel technologies, currently such as expression profiles. The underlying data are derived from various research activities. Thus CSB project provides an integrated and centralised public resource allowing universal access on the generated knowledge – CSB.DB: A Comprehensive Systems-Biology Database. The derived knowledge should support the formulation of new hypotheses about the respective functional involvement of genes beyond their (inter-) relationships. Another major goal of the CSB project is to supply the researchers with necessary information to formulate these new hypotheses without demanding any a-priori statistical knowledge of the user. The CSB project mainly focuses on application of required statistical tests as well as to assist the user during exploration of results with information / help files to support hypothesis generation (). Statistical background may help in result interpretation and to infer biological hypothesis, but is not necessary. CSB.DB: A Resource for the Science CommunityThe enormous quantity of data produced by multi-parallel technologies, such as microarray analyses or metabolic profiling with e.g. Gas Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) and the applied statistical analyses, poses the challenge for recirculation of the results to the whole biological community. The publicly available data are important resources for co-response analyses as well as other cross-experiment investigations. Moreover it is in the best interest of the science community that the statistical analyses on these data as well as the tools for analyses will be available to all. Therefore CSB.DB provides a public web interface for release of statistical analyses which are linked to current biological information and represent a gate to systems biology. The scientific community will be able to search and validate the statistical results by their own criterions of interest, whether by entities of interest, like gene pair correlation, or by organisms. The output can be defined by the user according to a set of categories and implemented query pages. CSB: Future DirectionsOnce The CSB.DB has met its immediate goals of providing a database that can be used by local and public researchers to retrieve biostatistical analyses of expression profile data, the CSB project will embark on some long-term goals. At first, we will explore methods to transfer the richness and data depths for e.g. Arabidopsis thaliana to other (plant) organisms. In this point of view, CSB.DB intends to be a fundamental data source within a platform for comparative systems biology. Moreover CSB.DB will improve the current data analyses to provide summarised results and visualised outputs for the public researchers. Beyond it, CSB.DB will extend the statistical analyses from expression level to metabolite and protein level as well as to development tools to integrate these different basic levels of cellular complexity. |