Migration from Static to Dynamic Web Interface - Enzyme Thermodynamics Database as an Example

摘要

The era of internet based bioinformatics has created a unique opportunity to develop creative web tools and techniques to communicate complex biological data. Enzyme thermodynamics data is rich in Greek letter, superscripts and subscripts, and IUPAC has established precise data standards for their use in desktop publishing. However, current database software such as MySQL or ORACLE does not provide satisfactory support to these data. For this reason, many web resources ignore these data standards. Static web pages, that use pre-defined HTML, are a solution for this problem; however, they pose serious difficulties for navigation through large data such as those in enzyme thermodynamics database. For that reason we decided to migrate enzyme thermodynamics data to a dynamic web page using initially ORACLE and then MySQL. Here we discuss our experience in this process. The enzyme thermodynamics database is the largest comprehensive collection of high quality data on enzyme-catalyzed reactions. At this time this database contains data from over 1000 publications on over 400 different enzyme catalyzed reactions.