The Databases@CSB.DB: A Short Inside

In the current version of CSB.DB the public databases are subdivided into three major parts. The first part covers the statistical analyses applied to expression profile data which were generated on different microarray technology platforms. This part, called Co-Response Databases currently contains the transcriptional co-responses (gene-gene correlations) of the prokaryotic model organism Escherichia coli (EcoCoR@CS.DB), the eukaryotic model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae (SceCoR@CSBDB) and the eukaryotic plant model organism Arabidopsis thaliana (AthCoR@CSB.DB). Pair wise gene correlations can be obtained e.g. via the 'Single Gene Query Page (sGQ)', which allows the user to insert a gene of interest and get all significantly positive or negative associated genes. The statistic parameters, which mean the probability, the confidence interval and the power of the applied test, are dynamically calculated based on the underlying test distribution of the respective correlation coefficient. Moreover a detailed statistical analysis can be obtained for a selected gene pair by user validation of output. Beyond it, the validation allows the detection of outliers, which may be associated with technical errors, biological variance or can represent a biological regulatory event, as well as a variety of graphical plots. The second part will focus on analytical techniques whereas the third part covers CSB.DB Associated Web Pages, like the Plant Subtilase Database (PSDB), which were featured and maintained by CSB.DB Development Core Team. The associated web pages contain predominantly manually curated gene annotations of specialists having specific research interests and beyond that they provide experimentally derived results.