Immunome, Immtree and Immunity: Databases for Systems Biology of Immune System

Abstract

Many genes and proteins are required to carry out the processes of innate and adaptive immunity. For many studies, including systems biology and evolutionary studies, it is necessary to have a clear and comprehensive definition of the immune system, including the genes and proteins that take part in immunological processes. We have identified and cataloged a large portion of the human immunology-related genes, which we call the essential immunome. The 847 identified genes and proteins were annotated and collected in the Immunome database. Another internet resource, ImmTree, was constructed for studying the evolution and evolutionary trees of the human immune system. ImmTree contains information about orthologs in 80 species collected from three public ortholog databases. A third database, Immunity, was created to cover nonhuman immunity related proteins and their orthologs. These databases have many uses and can be applied in many ways to investigate immunity in multicellular organisms.