Bioinformatics
The role of this group, supported by ICSU, was to consider the organization and validation of public databases, and issues such as continuity of funding, quality control and freedom of access. R. Cammack, H. Berman, C. Cantor and R. Apweiler from the Biochemical Nomenclature Committee are members of IUBG. The final report of the group was published [5]. It contains recommendations for
- the safeguarding of biological data;
- preservation of primary biological data and unrestricted access
- intellectual property rights
- standardization issues
Details are available at http://md.chem.rug.nl/~berends/IUBG-FinalReport.html
Consistent nomenclature is essential for efficient retrieval of information from databases. Many of the large international databases of genomic, proteomic and related information use EC numbers as identifiers for enzymes. These include Swiss-Prot and TrEMBL; BRENDA, NCBI; KEGG; PDB, UM-BBD, ERGO, GO and the MEROPS list of peptidases.
Reference
5. Berendsen, H.J.C. Inter-union bioinformatics group report. Acta Crystallogr. Sect. D-Biol. Crystallogr. 59 (2003) 777-782.
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