Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access originally published online on October 15, 2008
Nucleic Acids Research 2009 37(Database issue):D925-D932; doi:10.1093/nar/gkn730
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Nucleic Acids Research, 2009, Vol. 37, Database issue D925-D932
© 2008 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article appears in the following Nucleic Acids Research issue: Database issue [View the issue table of contents]
Articles |
Cell Line Data Base: structure and recent improvements towards molecular authentication of human cell lines
1Bioinformatics, 2Cell Bank, National Cancer Research Institute and 3IEIIT, National Research Council, Genova, Italy
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +39 010 5737 288; Fax: +39 010 5737 295; Email: paolo.romano{at}istge.it
Received August 14, 2008. Revised September 30, 2008. Accepted October 1, 2008.
The Cell Line Data Base (CLDB) is a well-known reference information source on human and animal cell lines including information on more than 6000 cell lines. Main biological features are coded according to controlled vocabularies derived from international lists and taxonomies. HyperCLDB (http://bioinformatics.istge.it/hypercldb/) is a hypertext version of CLDB that improves data accessibility by also allowing information retrieval through web spiders. Access to HyperCLDB is provided through indexes of biological characteristics and navigation in the hypertext is granted by many internal links. HyperCLDB also includes links to external resources. Recently, an interest was raised for a reference nomenclature for cell lines and CLDB was seen as an authoritative system. Furthermore, to overcome the cell line misidentification problem, molecular authentication methods, such as fingerprinting, single-locus short tandem repeat (STR) profile and single nucleotide polymorphisms validation, were proposed. Since this data is distributed, a reference portal on authentication of human cell lines is needed. We present here the architecture and contents of CLDB, its recent enhancements and perspectives. We also present a new related database, the Cell Line Integrated Molecular Authentication (CLIMA) database (http://bioinformatics.istge.it/clima/), that allows to link authentication data to actual cell lines.