Abstract
A number of the behaviors of the fly are similar to those of humans. More than 60% of human disease homologous genes have been found within fly. Therefore, the fly can be considered a proper model organism for numerous systematic research fields, such as studies of biochemical synthesis and memory formatting mechanisms. To study the large scale systematic problems, strategies based on gene-gene interaction become a feasible solution. For this reason, more and more databases and tools for biological interactions have been developed in the last decade. However, highly data type inconsistence and user interface diversities are commonly found in those tools. In order to increase the usability and integrate those of inconsistent data, we developed PCmap (Post-genomic connectivity map viewer) by using fly as the model organism. PCmap provides an easy-to-use graphic user interface and a comprehensive querying system from different data sources including protein-protein/protein-RNA interaction datasets and metabolic pathway databases which can assist systematic studies of fly. Moreover, PCmap is the first integrated database which provides fully functionalities of path finder of interaction network and logical operations of different maps. With the help of PCmap’s information retrieval modules, researchers can enlarge their research gene sets based on a few core genes discovered by wet-lab experiments. We believe that PCmap is not only the visualization tool but a network analyzer which can provide powerful applications to wet-lab researches. PCmap is now freely available on (http://pcmap.life.nthu.edu.tw).