It focuses on pathways involved in the regulation of transcription factors in different species, mainly human, mouse and rat. Elements of the relevant signal transduction pathways like hormones, receptors, enzymes and transcription factors are stored together with information about their interaction and references in an object-oriented database. Objects provide a natural way to represent those elements as data. Interactions are modeled as reactant and produce collections of the signal components, or as activation and inhibition pointers, to enable the system to be used encyclopedically or as the basis for simulation. Queries to the database are conducted via the Internet by submitting names of signaling molecules.
All information is validated with references to the original publications.
To make the system useful, it has to contain extensive data on the various signal transduction pathways. The users have their background in biological sciences, and can not be expected to spend much time to learn how to retrieve the data, therefore the basic user interface should be intuitive and simple. Also, a good visualization of the signaling cascades is essential for getting an overview. For computational data processing, an understandable, standardized format for data exchange is needed to make it easy for developers to integrate the database into their applications. By human readers as a knowledge base about the connections in the known signaling networks.