MusBanks^SM, a portal to worldwide mutant databases.

Numerous numbers of mouse mutants are being generated worldwide and databases featuring simple catalog lists of available mice resources have been constructed.
Most of the catalog records only address a mutated gene and its phenotypic effect, however, they are not well linked to pathways or physiological networks, which are described in other databases, e.g. MEDLINE. The separation of mutant information and network information prevents biologists from fully utilizing the bio-resources. An intelligent system is desired for biologists to search mutant databases through network information connecting a user-specified keyword and the gene altered in the mutants.

In order to connect the distributed pieces of information as a thread of inference, we have recently developed MusBanks^SM, which associates user’s arbitrary keywords with the bio-resources. MusBanks^SM is an application of the PosMed^SM system which possesses an inference-oriented full text search engine. At first, MusBanks^SM performs a full-text search of the document database (e.g. MEDLINE) by using arbitrary keywords users have entered. And second, MusBanks^SM finds significant gene names or symbols that exist within the matched documents with statistical tests and makes a ranked list of the genes. Thirdly, MusBanks^SM displays a list of the mutant mice whose altered genes are associated to the keywords. (i.e., MusBanks^SM can search for connections of
Keyword => Gene1 => Mutant.)
Simultaneously, MusBanks^SM searches for related genes via estimated gene-gene relationships, and shows connections of Keyword => Gene1 => Gene2 => Mutant.