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Bioinformatics Advance Access published online on October 26, 2006
Bioinformatics, doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btl372
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Published by Oxford University Press 2006
Received March 16, 2006
Revised June 29, 2006
Accepted July 4, 2006

Article

Babel's tower revisited: a universal resource for cross-referencing across annotation databases

Sorin Draghici 1 *, Sivakumar Sellamuthu 1, and Purvesh Khatri 1

1 Dept. of Computer Science, Wayne State University, 431 State Hall, Detroit, MI-48202, US

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sorin Draghici, E-mail: sorin{at}wayne.edu


  Abstract

Motivation: Annotation databases are widely used as public repositories of biological knowledge. However, most of these resources have been developed by independent groups which used different designs and different identifiers for the same biological entities. As weshow in this paper, incoherent name spaces between various databases represent a serious impediment to using the existing annotations at their full potential. Navigating between various such name spaces by mapping IDs from one database to another is a very important issue which is not properly addressed at the moment.

Results: We have developed a web-based resource, Onto-Translate (OT), which effectively addresses this problem. OT is able to map onto each other different types of biological entities from the following annotation databases: Swiss-Prot, TrEMBL, NREF, PIR, Gene Ontology, KEGG, Entrez Gene, GenBank, GenPept, IMAGE, RefSeq, UniGene, OMIM, PDB, Eukaryotic Promoter Database, HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee and NetAffx. Currently, OT is able to perform 462 types of mappings between 29 different types of IDs from 17 databases concerning 53 organisms. Among these, over 300 types of translations and 15 types of IDs are not currently supported by any other tool or resource. On average, OT is able to correctly map between 96% and 99% of the biological entities provided as input. In terms of speed, sets of approximatively 20,000 IDs can be translated in under 30 seconds, in most cases.

Availability: Onto-Translate is a part of Onto-Tools, which is freely available at http://vortex.cs.wayne.edu/Projects.html.

Associate Editor: Nikolaus Rajewsky
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