CellBase, a comprehensive collection of RESTful web services for retrieving relevant biological information from heterogeneous sources

Abstract

During the past years, the advances in high-throughput technologies have produced an unprecedented growth in the number and size of repositories and databases storing relevant biological data. Today, there is more biological information than ever but, unfortunately, the current status of many of these repositories is far from being optimal. Some of the most common problems are that the information is spread out in many small databases; frequently there are different standards among repositories and some databases are no longer supported or they contain too specific and unconnected information. In addition, data size is increasingly becoming an obstacle when accessing or storing biological data. All these issues make very difficult to extract and integrate information from different sources, to analyze experiments or to access and query this information in a programmatic way. CellBase provides a solution to the growing necessity of integration by easing the access to biological data. CellBase implements a set of RESTful web services that query a centralized database containing the most relevant biological data sources. The database is hosted in our servers and is regularly updated. CellBase documentation can be found at http://docs.bioinfo.cipf.es/projects/cellbase. © 2012 The Author(s).