Optimizing Reactome TRUST

Ontario Institute For Cancer Research, Toronto ON

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract We seek supplemental support to the core operating funding for the Reactome Knowledgebase of human biological pathways and processes. Reactome is a curated knowledgebase available online as an open access resource that can be freely used and redistributed by all members of the biological and biomedical research communities. It is used by clinicians, genomics researchers, and molecular biologists to interpret the results of high- throughput experimental studies, by bioinformaticians seeking to develop novel algorithms for mining knowledge from genomic studies, and by systems biologists building predictive models of normal and disease variant pathways. Our curators, Ph.D.-level scientists, work closely with independent investigators within the community to assemble machine-readable descriptions of human biological pathways. Each pathway is checked and peer-reviewed prior to publication to ensure its factual accuracy and compliance with the data model. A system of evidence tracking ensures that the primary literature supports all assertions. Reactome uses community-standard controlled vocabularies and ontologies to increase interoperability across resources. Pathways are reviewed and updated regularly. Reactome pathways are available on our website for browsing, downloading, and are accessible to in-house and third-party analysis tools. The project is highly cited in the literature, has been used repeatedly to make significant biological and clinical discoveries, and is incorporated into many high-impact informatics tools and resources. Over the next twelve months, to strengthen our adoption of the TRUST principles, we will improve relevant features of our curation and quality assurance and develop an intelligent user profiling system to better understand our user community and tool and data integrators. We will build tools to monitor data usage to inform our update schedule and to improve user access to legacy data. In parallel, we will [automate data collection, making our measures more detailed, reliable, and consistent. To further demonstrate to the research community that Reactome is a trustworthy data repository, and to drive our own development of further metrics we will apply for CoreTrustSeal certification.