Molecular Endocrinology: A Portal for Enhanced Access and Utility of the Nuclear Receptor Signaling Atlas (NURSA) Web Resource

This issue of Molecular Endocrinology features a minireview that describes the evolution and status of The Nuclear Receptor Signaling Atlas (NURSA). This National Institutes of Health-sponsored consortium was launched in 2002 to generate high-content, discovery-driven research datasets as a platform for developing an understanding of the role of nuclear receptors and coregulators in normal metabolic processes and pathologies. It was charged with integrating its research output of these component projects into an informatics framework and a supporting website for distributing the datasets and their analyses to the wider research community. A second, equally important challenge was to leverage legacy knowledge in the nuclear receptor and coregulator field and integrate it with Consortium datasets to create a unique resource that would be accessible to the entire scientific community. In addition to the support of the community, NURSA’s success relies on forging partnerships with the existing publishing infrastructure in the field. To this end, the NURSA consortium and Molecular Endocrinology have entered a partnership that is unique in scientific publishing. Specifically, in 2006, an agreement was made in which the NURSA curation team would annotate relevant Molecular Endocrinology articles back to 2002. These annotations would then be used to create direct links to NURSA Molecule Pages from the web versions of the articles, providing readers with a wealth of contextual information on a molecule relevant to that article. The NURSA Molecule Page is designed to integrate in a condensed, easily navigated form the essential elements of the mechanism, biology, and pathology of nuclear receptors, their coregulators, and their ligands. Recognizing that retrieving nuclear receptor- and coregulator-specific information in monolithic biological databases like NCBI and UniProt can be a daunting prospect, NURSA curators sifted these resources, gleaned the most important and essential descriptors (GeneID, UniProt ID, RefSeqs), and spliced them together in a single menu-driven interface. In addition, the Molecule Pages tie in relevant content from smaller specialist databases such as those curating crystal structures (PDB), splicing events (FastDB), expression (MousePAT, Allen Brain Atlas), and posttranslational modifications (Phosphosite). The collaboration between Molecular Endocrinology and NURSA also includes features designed to aid basic researchers in identifying translational aspects of their work. Specifically, the Molecule Page contains a distillation of databases documenting the key pathological associations of nuclear receptors and coregulators (HPRD, GAD, OMIM, in addition to NURSA’s own in-house curation) and the physiological consequences of their disruption in animal models. Finally, a new Google-powered search engine on the Molecule Page accommodates search strategies based on a specific disease or phenotype. The goals of the Molecule Page require the support of the research community, the National Institutes of Health, and The Endocrine Society. Accordingly, NURSA is developing features in the Molecule Pages that will afford motivated researchers to add to the NURSA knowledge base. Any of the components of the Molecule Pages that are based around literature citations will soon have built into them an interface in which a researcher can contribute articles for annotation. NURSA also welcomes the opportunity to host more extensive curational efforts. We urge all of our readers to visit and exploit the wealth of information available on the NURSA web site (www.nursa.org). Molecular Endocrinology is pleased to have been a part of this unique effort to enhance the accessibility and utility of comprehensive datasets to the field of endocrinology, and we look forward to new developments and resources provided by NURSA. In that regard, please look for a semiannual “What’s New in NURSA” editorial feature that will highlight new datasets and research tools provided by NURSA. We also hope to expand our journal’s role as a portal to other scientific collaborations and consortia that provide novel web-based datasets, informatics tools, and tutorials for the continued benefit of endocrinology research.