Igor Rodchenkov

Pathway Commons, a web resource for biological pathway data

Pathway Commons (http://www.pathwaycommons.org) is a collection of publicly available pathway data from multiple organisms. Pathway Commons provides a web-based interface that enables biologists to browse and search a comprehensive collection of pathways from multiple sources represented in a common language, a download site that provides integrated bulk sets of pathway information in standard or convenient formats and a web service that software developers can use to conveniently query and access all data. Database providers can share their pathway data via a common repository. Pathways include biochemical reactions, complex assembly, transport and catalysis events and physical interactions involving proteins, DNA, RNA, small molecules and complexes. Pathway Commons aims to collect and integrate all public pathway data available in standard formats. Pathway Commons currently contains data from nine databases with over 1400 pathways and 687,000 interactions and will be continually expanded and updated.

The BioPAX community standard for pathway data sharing

Biological Pathway Exchange (BioPAX) is a standard language to represent biological pathways at the molecular and cellular level and to facilitate the exchange of pathway data. The rapid growth of the volume of pathway data has spurred the development of databases and computational tools to aid interpretation; however, use of these data is hampered by the current fragmentation of pathway information across many databases with incompatible formats. BioPAX, which was created through a community process, solves this problem by making pathway data substantially easier to collect, index, interpret and share. BioPAX can represent metabolic and signaling pathways, molecular and genetic interactions and gene regulation networks. Using BioPAX, millions of interactions, organized into thousands of pathways, from many organisms are available from a growing number of databases. This large amount of pathway data in a computable form will support visualization, analysis and biological discovery.

Using biological pathway data with paxtools.

A rapidly growing corpus of formal, computable pathway information can be used to answer important biological questions including finding non-trivial connections between cellular processes, identifying significantly altered portions of the cellular network in a disease state and building predictive models that can be used for precision medicine. Due to its complexity and fragmented nature, however, working with pathway data is still difficult. We present Paxtools, a Java library that contains algorithms, software components and converters for biological pathways represented in the standard BioPAX language. Paxtools allows scientists to focus on their scientific problem by removing technical barriers to access and analyse pathway information. Paxtools can run on any platform that has a Java Runtime Environment and was tested on most modern operating systems. Paxtools is open source and is available under the Lesser GNU public license (LGPL), which allows users to freely use the code in their software systems with a requirement for attribution. Source code for the current release (4.2.0) can be found in Software S1. A detailed manual for obtaining and using Paxtools can be found in Protocol S1. The latest sources and release bundles can be obtained from biopax.org/paxtools.

Pattern search in BioPAX models

Motivation: BioPAX is a standard language for representing complex cellular processes, including metabolic networks, signal transduction and gene regulation. Owing to the inherent complexity of a BioPAX model, searching for a specific type of subnetwork can be non-trivial and difficult. Results: We developed an open source and extensible framework for defining and searching graph patterns in BioPAX models. We demonstrate its use with a sample pattern that captures directed signaling relations between proteins. We provide search results for the pattern obtained from the Pathway Commons database and compare these results with the current data in signaling databases SPIKE and SignaLink. Results show that a pattern search in public pathway data can identify a substantial amount of signaling relations that do not exist in signaling databases. Availability: BioPAX-pattern software was developed in Java. Source code and documentation is freely available at http://code.google.com/p/biopax-pattern under Lesser GNU Public License. Contact: patternsearch@cbio.mskcc.org Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

The BioPAX validator

Summary: BioPAX is a community-developed standard language for biological pathway data. A key functionality required for efficient BioPAX data exchange is validation—detecting errors and inconsistencies in BioPAX documents. The BioPAX Validator is a command-line tool, Java library and online web service for BioPAX that performs >100 classes of consistency checks. Availability and implementation: The validator recognizes common syntactic errors and semantic inconsistencies and reports them in a customizable human readable format. It can also automatically fix some errors and normalize BioPAX data. Since its release, the validator has become a critical tool for the pathway informatics community, detecting thousands of errors and helping substantially increase the conformity and uniformity of BioPAX-formatted data. The BioPAX Validator is open source and released under LGPL v3 license. All sources, binaries and documentation can be found at sf.net/p/biopax, and the latest stable version of the web application is available at biopax.org/validator. Contact: igor.rodchenkov@utoronto.ca or gary.bader@utoronto.ca

The BioPAX community standard for pathway data sharing (Nature Biotechnology (2010) 28, (935-942))

BioPAX (Biological Pathway Exchange) is a standard language to represent biological pathways at the molecular and cellular level. Its major use is to facilitate the exchange of pathway data (http://www.biopax.org). Pathway data captures our understanding of biological processes, but its rapid growth necessitates development of databases and computational tools to aid interpretation. However, the current fragmentation of pathway information across many databases with incompatible formats presents barriers to its effective use. BioPAX solves this problem by making pathway data substantially easier to collect, index, interpret and share. BioPAX can represent metabolic and signaling pathways, molecular and genetic interactions and gene regulation networks. BioPAX was created through a community process. Through BioPAX, millions of interactions organized into thousands of pathways across many organisms, from a growing number of sources, are available. Thus, large amounts of pathway data are available in a computable form to support visualization, analysis and biological discovery.