Research on the move for disease-causing pathogens

MADISON, WIS.—Scientists at the University of Madison-Wisconsin will team up with an information technology company SRA International, Inc., to build an online, publicly accessible library of data on infectious agents and their genomes

The work is part of an estimated $13.6 million, five-year contract awarded to SRA by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a branch of the National Institutes of Health, and will be one of multiple newly established Bioinformatics Resource Centers for Bio-Defense and Emerging/Re-emerging Infectious Diseases, each focusing on a different set of animal and human pathogens, officials say.

The system is designed to facilitate scientific research; the resource will consolidate known information about enterobacteria, a group of pathogens that can cause diseases such as dysentery, plague and typhoid fever. The site will also include information about diarrheagenic E. coli, one of the most studied species in modern biology.

The resource will consolidate information about what the genes do and identify those shared across organisms. All publications identifying the genes or their roles will be listed.

Researchers using the database can make contributions, adding new pieces of information to complete the picture.

The resource, called ERIC (Enteropathogen Integration Center) can be viewed online at www.ricbrc.org.

The site will be updated as more information and research is collected.