Semantics and Services enabled Problem Solving Environment for T. cruzi
T.cruzi is a protozoan parasite and a relative of other human pathogens that cause African sleeping sickness and leishmaniasis. Approximately 18 million people in Latin America are infected with this parasite, and as many as 40% of these are predicted to eventually suffer from Chagas disease, which is the leading cause of heart disease and sudden death in middle-aged adults in the region. Currently, there is a single manufactured drug for treatment of the infection; but this drug has severe side effects and is also carcinogenic. Diagnosis of the infection is poor and there are no vaccines for prevention of the infection. Moreover, T.cruzi presents a level of complexity that, though not unique, is substantial.
Research in many biological systems, particularly those involving infectious agents, continues to experience an enormous increase in information with the sequencing of genomes, the use of expression profiling, and the completion of proteomic analyses. For example, annotated genomes and comparative analyses of two T.cruzi related kinetoplastids, Trypanosoma brucei [3] and Leishmania major [4], and a whole organism (all life-cycle stages) proteome analysis of T.cruzi have been published [2]. Data from other sequencing projects in T.cruzi, including ESTs [11], preexisting and ongoing expression profiling (DNA microarray [12]) and proteome analyses are also available. These dynamic datasets, addressing different but logically related aspects, are distributed over multiple databases that undergo frequent additions and curation.
The Semantics and Services enabled Problem Solving Environment for T. cruzi project aims to utilize state-of-the-art semantic technologies for effective querying of multiple databases through creation of a suite of ontologies modeling multiple aspects of T.cruzi research domain. The Trykipedia is a Wiki-based resource for the ontologies being created as part of this project:
1. Parasite Life Cycle ontology
2. Provenance ontology for Transcriptome and Gene Knockout Experiment
