The BESC Knowledge Base and Public Web Portal for Bioenergy-related Organisms

The objective of the BESC Knowledge base project is to develop and implement an infrastructure to represent systems level knowledge, data and information about key plants, microbes, and molecules in BESC and provide views of these data to users. The Knowledgebase (KB) is designed to aid investigators in the comprehensive evaluation of organisms for bioenergy associated strategies. Specifically, the Knowledgebase provides annotations of sequenced bioenergy related organisms, their phenotypic characteristics, pathway genome databases (PGDBs) for each organism, orthology information, a set of tools for annotation and analysis of carbohydrate active enzymes (CAZymes tool kit) and a diverse set of product annotations from different public resources, like InterPro, CDD, COG, PFAM, SMART, and others. The user environment has (i) genomic tools and gene cards, (ii) BioCyc pathway tools including capabilities to search and browse PGDBs, (iii) a comparative analysis environment for overlaying the metabolic maps with BESC or user provided experimental 'omics' data, (iv) a knowledge mining environment that allows phenotype comparison in terms of CAZy Families/ Pathways/ Enzymes and