Cell interaction knowledgebase: an online database for innate immune cells, cytokines and chemokines.

The innate immune system is fundamental to the recognition of pathogens, triggering of immune-inflammatory response and host defense. Recent advance in this area has resulted in enormous amount of data, which are stored across different databases. Integrating relevant information from these different data sources is difficult because of their heterogeneous nature and dispersed physical location.

Transition to quorum sensing in an Agrobacterium population: A stochastic model.

Understanding of the intracellular molecular machinery that is responsible for the complex collective behavior of multicellular populations is an exigent problem of modern biology. Quorum sensing, which allows bacteria to activate genetic programs cooperatively, provides an instructive and tractable example illuminating the causal relationships between the molecular organization of gene networks and the complex phenotypes they control. In this work we--to our knowledge for the first time--present a detailed model of the population-wide transition to quorum sensing using the example of Agrobacterium tumefaciens.