The Construction of the Knowledge Base of Immune System

The paradigm shift from experimentals to bioinformatics is apparent in many areas of biology. There are immediate demands to construct databases that are designed for computer analysis of biological phenomena. Specifically, the immune system has been researched very intensely in experimentals because it is essential to protect our bodies against viruses, bacteria, and other foreign things. The immune system is made up of cell-cell interactions and cytoplasmic signal transductions. In recent years many molecules have been identified and characterized, as well as many interactions among them. Thus, we focus on the immune system and investigate most specified and embodied cell-cell interactions. Among multicellular organisms, only vertebrates can have immune system in their bodies, and various events would occur by complicated interactions between specified cells, T-cells, B-cells, macrophages, etc. In addition, cell differentiation is deeply crosslinked to the immune system in terms of cells’ roles, because cells are changing their characters through differentiation by ligand stimulation. Therefore when we try to understand the immune system, we must refer to cell differentiation in terms of signal transductions and analyze the pathways that result from many interactions. However, there is virtually no database for the immune system that refers to signal transductions and cell-cell interactions. Our database is designed in a similar way as BRITE [1] database which contains cell cycles and early developing stages, and we can analyze systematically the immune system, for example, by using the information of the whole genomes sequences.