Reactome: a database of reactions, pathways and biological processes

TLDR

Reactome is an open‑source curated database of human pathways and reactions developed by a collaboration of research institutes. The project aims to extend Reactome to non‑human species through orthology‑based pathway inference and to create curated datasets for chicken, Drosophila, and rice. A new Reactome website incorporates an SBGN‑based Pathway Browser, PSIQUIC‑powered interaction overlays, analysis tools for ID mapping and overrepresentation, and orthology inference via Ensembl Compara for 20 species. The updated site enables browsing and analysis of the newly inferred pathway sets, demonstrating the platform’s expanded cross‑species coverage.

Abstract

Reactome ( http://www.reactome.org ) is a collaboration among groups at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York University School of Medicine and The European Bioinformatics Institute, to develop an open source curated bioinformatics database of human pathways and reactions. Recently, we developed a new web site with improved tools for pathway browsing and data analysis. The Pathway Browser is an Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN)-based visualization system that supports zooming, scrolling and event highlighting. It exploits PSIQUIC web services to overlay our curated pathways with molecular interaction data from the Reactome Functional Interaction Network and external interaction databases such as IntAct, BioGRID, ChEMBL, iRefIndex, MINT and STRING. Our Pathway and Expression Analysis tools enable ID mapping, pathway assignment and overrepresentation analysis of user-supplied data sets. To support pathway annotation and analysis in other species, we continue to make orthology-based inferences of pathways in non-human species, applying Ensembl Compara to identify orthologs of curated human proteins in each of 20 other species. The resulting inferred pathway sets can be browsed and analyzed with our Species Comparison tool. Collaborations are also underway to create manually curated data sets on the Reactome framework for chicken, Drosophila and rice.