Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) in collaboration with the team of Hiroaki Kitano from the Systems Biology Institute (SBI), Tokyo, are working on development of a disease map of Parkinson’s disease – the PD map.
The PD map is a knowledge repository established to describe mechanisms of PD by means of molecular networks to grasp complex relationships between the genetic and environmental risk factors. It can serve as an interface to bioinformatics tools allowing exploration and updating the contents of the map using standardized annotations. Another functionality of the map is visualization of large experimental datasets, allowing their analysis in the context of disease mechanisms.
The map has reached substantial size and complexity. Keeping it up-to-date and refining it with limited resources will be a challenge. The PD map is seen as a crowd-sourcing project, where an interested and knowledgeable research community is engaged in solving a problem, similar to WikiPathways or Payao, but focused on disease-related mechanisms. Already implemented functionality allows users to directly send their feedback on the map contents (see User guide).
The results of this work have been published in the open-access article: “Integrating pathways of Parkinson’s disease”, Molecular Neurobiology.