Elements of a microcirculation physiome database: a web-based interactive tool for inflammation research and education

Summary form only received as follows: The biomedical engineering community recognizes the need to organize physiological data in a comprehensive, user-friendly, and accessible format. The microcirculation is a functional system that spans all organ systems and shares certain characteristics of organization with metabolic pathways, which have successfully been organized around genomic information for several prokaryotes, for example for Escherischia coli (http://ecocyc.pangeasystems.com/ecocyc/). At the University of Virginia, the authors have developed a web-based research and teaching tool (http://hsc.Virginia.edu/medicine/basicsci/biomed/ley/) that covers the leukocyte adhesion cascade. Currently, the site is organized in a flat-text mode with hypertext links to GenBank for nucleotide sequences, Medline and online journals for references, and PDB/rasmol for tertiary structure of relevant molecules at atomic resolution. The web site is intended for graduate student education, and as a research resource for genetic researchers interested in gene function and for physiologists and biomedical engineers interested in the molecular basis of the leukocyte adhesion cascade. The authors´ effort is intended to be a beginning toward a distributed database for the microcirculation (microcirculation physiome, see http://www.bme.ihu.edu/news/microphys). Next steps in the development of the microcirculation physiome include efforts to provide means for integration and to develop new, uniform formats such as active web sites to handle the information more efficiently