Nucleic Acids Research, 2007, Vol. 35, Database issue D573 Figure 1. Mint growth. The graph on the left represents the growth in the number of interactions stored in MINT. The right graph represents the corresponding growth in the number of curated articles. Figure 2. The pie charts represent the number of interactions stored in MINT for the different species. (since January 2006). This choice was made in agreement with the other members of the International Molecular- Interaction Exchange consortium (IMEx http://imex. sourceforge.net/), including DIP (3), IntAct (1), MPact (4) and BIND (5). IMEx aims at avoiding work overlaps, at shar- ing the curation workload and at exchanging completed records on MI data. DATABASE CURATION Since January 2006, the syntax and the semantics for data representation have been provided by the Proteomics Stan- dards Initiative-Molecular Interaction (PSI-MI 2.5) standards. The PSI workgroup develops and maintains a common data standard allowing users to retrieve all relevant data from dif- ferent data providers and to perform comparative analysis (6). Each stored interaction represents, according to the PSI-MI standards, a physical interaction, a direct interaction or a co- localization. All the database records created before January 2005 underwent a drastic quality control performed by the new MINT curation staff composed of PhD level curators. All the previous entries were re-curated according to the new PSI-MI standard. Entries that could not be updated according to PSI-MI standards were deleted from the data- base in order to maintain a high quality dataset. The MINT Curation Reference Manual is being developed in collabora- tion with the other IMEx partners and is available at http:// imex.sourceforge.net/doc/imex-curationManual.doc. The new data submission HTML forms beneﬁt from an improved automatic check based on curation rules. This ensures that mandatory ﬁelds are ﬁlled and that annotated ranges or residues are consistent with the protein length reported by Uniprot. In addition, for the purpose of ensuring high ﬁdelity annotation, every new entry derived from low-throughput experiments undergoes a further validation step performed by a different curator before release to the public. DATA ACCESS AND DISTRIBUTION The new web-based interface includes a number of improve- ments and enhancements allowing a more efﬁcient database exploration. Most notably, the query can be based on protein