Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Background
The explosion in biological information has created the need for databases that are easy to develop and maintain and are simple to manipulate by annotators who are most likely to be biologists. However, deployment of scalable and extensible databases is not an easy task, and generally requires substantial expertise in database development.

Results
BioBuilder is a Zope-based software tool that was developed to facilitate intuitive development of protein databases. Protein data can be entered and annotated through web-based forms along with the flexibility to add customized annotation features to protein entries. A built-in review system permits a global team of scientists to coordinate their annotation efforts as was done by our international team during the development of Human Protein Reference Database (http://www.hprd.org). All the data can be exported in extensible markup language (XML) format, which is rapidly becoming as the standard format for data exchange.

Conclusions
As the proteomic data for several organisms begins to accumulate, BioBuilder will prove to be an invaluable platform for functional annotation and development of customizable protein centric databases. BioBuilder is open source and is available under the terms of LGPL.