AsthmaMap: An interactive knowledge repository for mechanisms of asthma

• Published in: Journal of allergy and clinical immunology 2021-03, Vol.147 (3), p.853-856
• Main Authors: Mazein, Alexander, Ivanova, Olga, Balaur, Irina, Ostaszewski, Marek, Berzhitskaya, Valeriya, Serebriyskaya, Tatiana, Ligon, Thomas, Hasenauer, Jan, De Meulder, Bertrand, Overall, Rupert W., Roy, Ludovic, Knowles, Richard G., Wheelock, Craig E., Dahlen, Sven-Erik, Chung, Kian Fan, Adcock, Ian M., Roberts, Graham, Djukanovic, Ratko, Pellet, Johann, Gawron, Piotr, Balling, Rudi, Maitland-van der Zee, Anke H., Schneider, Reinhard, Sterk, Peter J., Auffray, Charles
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arteriosclerosis; Asthma; Biology; Cell death; Cytokines; data interpretation; Design; Disease; disease map; disease mechanisms; Gene mapping; Hypotheses; Hypothesis testing; knowledge representation; Medicin och hälsovetenskap; Medicine; Rheumatoid arthritis; Signal transduction; Subject specialists; Visualization
• ISSN: 0091-6749; 1097-6825; 1097-6825
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jaci.2020.11.032

The goal of this work is the integration of the existing knowledge from molecular biology, cell biology, and medicine on asthma into a molecular and cellular interaction map of the disease to make possible advanced data interpretation, hypothesis generation, and validation for many related projects. Since the AsthmaMap project was first announced in a brief editorial,1 it has evolved into a browsable online resource accessible via https://asthma-map.org in which map modules are composed into a single hierarchically organized system. Recent advances in systems biology have enabled the creation of representations of mechanisms for multiple diseases2 including recently published examples for rheumatoid arthritis,3 atherosclerosis,4 and regulated cell death in cancer.5 These maps are used for modeling, hypothesis generation, and validation in a relevant clinical context as reviewed in the Disease Maps community article2 and described in a recent publication about the Atlas of Cancer Signalling Network applied in preclinical studies.6 Such resources are referred to as “disease maps” and are defined as conceptual models of the corresponding diseases, collections of interconnected signaling, and metabolic and gene regulatory processes2,7 (https://disease-maps.org). Cellular Interactions—an overview diagram of the involved cell types and corresponding pathways represented by cytokines and receptors; Molecular Relations—a collection of diagrams split according to cell types that can be seen as a single virtual map with an intermediate level of detail; and Biochemical Mechanisms—the most detailed layer where information is shown at the level of molecular processes.