Division of Vaccine Discovery, La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, 9420 Athena Circle, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA.
Immunogenetics. 2010 Apr;62(4):185-96. doi: 10.1007/s00251-010-0435-2. Epub 2010 Mar 6.
In the last decade, significant progress has been made in expanding the scope and depth of publicly available immunological databases and online analysis resources, which have become an integral part of the repertoire of tools available to the scientific community for basic and applied research. Herein, we present a general overview of different resources and databases currently available. Because of our association with the Immune Epitope Database and Analysis Resource, this resource is reviewed in more detail. Our review includes aspects such as the development of formal ontologies and the type and breadth of analytical tools available to predict epitopes and analyze immune epitope data. A common feature of immunological databases is the requirement to host large amounts of data extracted from disparate sources. Accordingly, we discuss and review processes to curate the immunological literature, as well as examples of how the curated data can be used to generate a meta-analysis of the epitope knowledge currently available for diseases of worldwide concern, such as influenza and malaria. Finally, we review the impact of immunological databases, by analyzing their usage and citations, and by categorizing the type of citations. Taken together, the results highlight the growing impact and utility of immunological databases for the scientific community.
在过去的十年中，在扩展公共可用的免疫学数据库和在线分析资源的范围和深度方面取得了重大进展，这些资源已成为科学界进行基础和应用研究的工具组合的不可或缺的一部分。在此，我们将对当前可用的不同资源和数据库进行概述。由于我们与免疫表位数据库和分析资源协会有关，因此对该资源进行了更详细的审查。我们的审查包括正式本体论的发展以及可用于预测表位和分析免疫表位数据的分析工具的类型和广度等方面。免疫学数据库的一个共同特征是需要托管从不同来源提取的大量数据。因此，我们讨论并审查了对免疫学文献进行策展的过程，以及如何利用策展数据来对目前可用于流感和疟疾等全球关注疾病的表位知识进行荟萃分析的示例。最后，我们通过分析其使用情况和引用情况以及对引用类型进行分类，来审查免疫学数据库的影响。总的来说，这些结果突出了免疫学数据库对科学界的日益增长的影响和实用性。
