Summary form only received as follows: The biomedical engineeringcommunity recognizes the need to organize physiological data in acomprehensive, user-friendly, and accessible format. Themicrocirculation is a functional system that spans all organ systems andshares certain characteristics of organization with metabolic pathways,which have successfully been organized around genomic information forseveral prokaryotes, for example for Escherischia coli(http://ecocyc.pangeasystems.com/ecocyc/). At the University ofVirginia, the authors have developed a web-based research and teachingtool (http://hsc.Virginia.edu/medicine/basicsci/biomed/ley/) that coversthe leukocyte adhesion cascade. Currently, the site is organized in aflat-text mode with hypertext links to GenBank for nucleotide sequences,Medline and online journals for references, and PDB/rasmol for tertiarystructure of relevant molecules at atomic resolution. The web site isintended for graduate student education, and as a research resource forgenetic researchers interested in gene function and for physiologistsand biomedical engineers interested in the molecular basis of theleukocyte adhesion cascade. The authors' effort is intended to be abeginning toward a distributed database for the microcirculation(microcirculation physiome, see http://www.bme.ihu.eduews/microphys).Next steps in the development of the microcirculation physiome includeefforts to provide means for integration and to develop new, uniformformats such as active web sites to handle the information moreefficiently
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