MetaBase--the wiki-database of biological databases.

Biology is generating more data than ever. As a result, there is an ever increasing number of publicly available databases that analyse, integrate and summarize the available data, providing an invaluable resource for the biological community. As this trend continues, there is a pressing need to organize, catalogue and rate these resources, so that the information they contain can be most effectively exploited.

Enhancing navigation in biomedical databases by community voting and database-driven text classification.

Background: The breadth of biological databases and their information content continues to increase exponentially. Unfortunately, our ability to query such sources is still often suboptimal. Here, we introduce and apply community voting, database-driven text classification, and visual aids as a means to incorporate distributed expert knowledge, to automatically classify database entries and to efficiently retrieve them.

Osteogenesis associates with inflammation in early-stage atherosclerosis evaluated by molecular imaging in vivo.

Background: Arterial calcification is associated with cardiovascular events; however, mechanisms of calcification in atherosclerosis remain obscure.

Methods And Results: We tested the hypothesis that inflammation promotes osteogenesis in atherosclerotic plaques using in vivo molecular imaging in apolipoprotein E-/- mice (20 to 30 weeks old, n=35). A bisphosphonate-derivatized near-infrared fluorescent imaging agent (excitation 750 nm) visualized osteogenic activity that was otherwise undetectable by x-ray computed tomography.

PepBank--a database of peptides based on sequence text mining and public peptide data sources.

Background: Peptides are important molecules with diverse biological functions and biomedical uses. To date, there does not exist a single, searchable archive for peptide sequences or associated biological data. Rather, peptide sequences still have to be mined from abstracts and full-length articles, and/or obtained from the fragmented public sources.

Cell-specific targeting of nanoparticles by multivalent attachment of small molecules.

Nanomaterials with precise biological functions have considerable potential for use in biomedical applications. Here we investigate whether multivalent attachment of small molecules can increase specific binding affinity and reveal new biological properties of such nanomaterials. We describe the parallel synthesis of a library comprising 146 nanoparticles decorated with different synthetic small molecules.