The Mouse Functional Genome Database (MfunGD): functional annotation of proteins in the light of their cellular context

MfunGD () provides a resource for annotated mouse proteins and their occurrence in protein networks. Manual annotation concentrates on proteins which are found to interact physically with other proteins. Accordingly, manually curated information from a protein–protein interaction database (MPPI) and a database of mammalian protein complexes is interconnected with MfunGD. Protein function annotation is performed using the Functional Catalogue (FunCat) annotation scheme which is widely used for the analysis of protein networks. The dataset is also supplemented with information about the literature that was used in the annotation process as well as links to the SIMAP Fasta database, the Pedant protein analysis system and cross-references to external resources. Proteins that so far were not manually inspected are annotated automatically by a graphical probabilistic model and/or superparamagnetic clustering. The database is continuously expanding to include the rapidly growing amount of functional information about gene products from mouse. MfunGD is implemented in GenRE, a J2EE-based component-oriented multi-tier architecture following the separation of concern principle

Classification Of 3D Dendritic Spines Using SOM

This work in progress shows a method for classifying dendritic spines by their shape. Focal points are the extraction of features from three-dimensional spine data and the following classification of the spines. Hence there will be only little reflection of biological aspects of this problem. Feature extraction based on moments and spherical coordinates will be discussed. Furthermore, this paper shows and describes a modified kind of Kohonen map and Neural Gas, which are used for the classification of the dendritic spines. 1 Introduction Biological examination often depends strongly on image-processing and image-analysing methods. The same is true for research concerning dendritic spines in the brain. Different forms of learning processes, such as filial imprinting, are accompanied by changes in the density of spines. Domestics chicks have been imprinted to acoustic stimuli show reduced densities of spine synapses on a distinct neuron type [1]. Preliminary qualitative examination reve..