Managing biological complexity across orthologs with a visual knowledgebase of documented biomolecular interactions

Abstract

The complexity of biomolecular interactions and influences is a major obstacle to their comprehension and elucidation. Visualizing knowledge of biomolecular interactions increases comprehension and facilitates the development of new hypotheses. The rapidly changing landscape of high-content experimental results also presents a challenge for the maintenance of comprehensive knowledgebases. Distributing the responsibility for maintenance of a knowledgebase to a community of subject matter experts is an effective strategy for large, complex and rapidly changing knowledgebases. Cognoscente serves these needs by building visualizations for queries of biomolecular interactions on demand, by managing the complexity of those visualizations, and by crowdsourcing to promote the incorporation of current knowledge from the literature.