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The p53 knowledgebase: an integrated information resource for p53 research

Abstract

The p53 tumor suppressor protein plays a central role in maintaining genomic integrity by occupying a nodal point in the DNA damage control pathway. Here it integrates a wide variety of signals, responding in one of several ways, that is, cell cycle arrest, senescence or programmed cell death (apoptosis). Mutations in the tumor suppressor gene tp53, which affects the key transcriptional regulatory processes in cell growth and death, occur frequently in cancer and helps explain why p53 has been called the guardian of the genome. There is a vast body of published knowledge on all aspects of p53's role in cancer. To facilitate research, it would be helpful if this information could be collected, curated and updated in a format that is easily accessible to the user community. To this end, we initiated the p53 knowledgebase project (http://p53.bii.a-star.edu.sg). The p53 knowledgebase is a user-friendly web portal incorporating visualization and analysis tools that integrates information from the published literature with other manually curated information to facilitate knowledge discovery. This includes curated information on sequence, structural, mutation, polymorphisms, protein–protein interactions, transcription factors, transcriptional targets, antibodies and post-translational modifications that involve p53. The goal is to collect and maintain all relevant data on p53 and present it in an easily accessible format that will be useful to researchers in the field.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge colleagues in the Cancer Biology Group at the Bioinformatics Institute (Chung Cheuk Wang, Chua Gek Huey, Erwin Tantoso, Yang Yuchen, Wong Sum Thai, Yeo Zhenxuan and Felicia Ng) for their curation effort, as well as advice and support from the p53 Focus Group made up of colleagues from our sister institutes within and outside the Biopolis. We are grateful for the advice, guidance and support from Professors Arnold Levine from the IAS/Princeton and Sidney Brenner. We acknowledge the efforts of Danny Chuon from the Web Services team for infrastructure support and various teams within the BioComputing Center at the Bioinformatics Institute for their excellent technical support throughout this project. We are grateful for the generous help and support of members of the computational biology community who have provided codes and advice for incorporation into our visualization and analysis tools. This work is supported by the Biomedical Research Council of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research of Singapore.

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Correspondence to G Rajagopal or D Lane.

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Lim, Y., Lim, T., Chan, Y. et al. The p53 knowledgebase: an integrated information resource for p53 research. Oncogene 26, 1517–1521 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.onc.1209952

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