NAR Molecular Biology Database Collection entry number 507

http://www.ebi.ac.uk/intact

Orchard, S.¹, Alam-Faruque, Y.¹, Aranda B.¹, Bridge, A.², Feuermann M.², Kerrien, S.¹, Khadake, J.¹, Montecchi-Palazzi, L.¹, Roechert, B.², Thorneycroft, D.¹, and Hermjakob, H.¹

¹EMBL Outstation - The European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK.
²Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics, Geneva, Switzerland.

Contact hhe@ebi.ac.uk

IntAct provides an open source database and toolkit for the storage, presentation and analysis of protein interactions. The web interface provides both textual and graphical representations of protein interactions, and allows exploring interaction networks in the context of the GO annotation or InterPro domains of the interacting proteins. A web service allows direct computational access to retrieve interaction networks in XML format. IntAct currently contains >170,000 binary and complex interactions imported from the literature and curated in collaboration with the Swiss-Prot team, making intensive use of controlled vocabularies to ensure data consistency. All IntAct software, data and controlled vocabularies are available at the URL provided.

IntAct has grown in size to >170,000 binary interactions over the last year, and includes nucleic acid and ligand interactions as well as protein. Different molecule types are described by a generalized 'interactor' datatype, which is further specified by a hierarchical controlled vocabulary of the PSI-MI ontology. Interacting molecules are systematically mapped to stable identifiers from public databases such as UniProtKB for proteins, ChEBI for small molecules and DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank nucleotide databases and/or Ensembl for nucleic acids.
The entire database source code has been updated, but the database remains completely open-source and available for local installation. The search facility has been considerably improved and updated to cope with the ever-increasing amount of data present in the database. Data downloads are available in both PSI-MI XML2.5 and PSI MITAB2.5.
Data are taken both from direct submissions or from detail-rich, "deep", high quality manual curation of molecular interactions from the literature. The curation manual is publicly available via the website, to ensure maximum transparency for the user. IntAct is an active member of the IMEx consortium.

The IntAct project is funded by the FELICS grant contract number 021902 (RII3) within the Research Infrastructure Action of the FP6 "Structuring the European Research Area" Programme

Hermjakob, H., Montecchi-Palazzi, L., Lewington, C., Mudali, S., Kerrien, S., Orchard, S., Vingron, M., Roechert, B., Roepstorff, P., Valencia, A., Margalit, H., Armstrong, J., Bairoch, A., Cesareni, G., Sherman, D., Apweiler, R. (2004) IntAct: an open source molecular interaction database. Nucleic Acids Research 32(1), D452-D455.

Go to the abstract in the NAR 2007 Database Issue.

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