MembraneLogic - A database to couple membrane protein sequences to variation and disease

Abstract

Bioinformatics data is growing faster than exponentially. This large amount of data has opened up many possibilities but it also poses many challenges as it is a tedious task to manually analyze this data. 25% of our genes translates to membrane proteins and they contain 60% of the drug targets. A genetic variation can alter the function of a protein, this can sometimes lead to a disease. Knowing where in the protein structure a disease causing variation occurs will aid drug designers in the drug discovery process. MembraneLogic is a database that through its automated data gathering process identifies the membrane proteins by prediction and links them to known SNPs and their relation to disease. The data it uses comes from NCBI Ensembl and PDB and the main prediction method used to identify membrane proteins is SCAMPI. Its web interface provides functionality to search for membrane proteins and diseases and see what variations are related to disease ,both in sequence and structure. The application is implemented with JAVA platform related tools and frameworks such as Grails, Spring and Hibernate.