KEGG: integrating viruses and cellular organisms

TLDR

KEGG is a manually curated resource that integrates 18 databases covering systems, genomic, chemical, and health information, and offers mapping tools to interpret cellular and organism-level functions from genome sequences and other molecular data. KEGG reconstructs molecular network systems by mapping functional orthologs, creating network variation maps that align related networks to illustrate how viruses alter signaling pathways, and integrating pathway, module, and KO databases to predict virus–cell interactions. The KEGG NETWORK database has linked numerous diseases to network variants—perturbed molecular networks caused by human gene variants, viruses, pathogens, and environmental factors.

Abstract

KEGG (https://www.kegg.jp/) is a manually curated resource integrating eighteen databases categorized into systems, genomic, chemical and health information. It also provides KEGG mapping tools, which enable understanding of cellular and organism-level functions from genome sequences and other molecular datasets. KEGG mapping is a predictive method of reconstructing molecular network systems from molecular building blocks based on the concept of functional orthologs. Since the introduction of the KEGG NETWORK database, various diseases have been associated with network variants, which are perturbed molecular networks caused by human gene variants, viruses, other pathogens and environmental factors. The network variation maps are created as aligned sets of related networks showing, for example, how different viruses inhibit or activate specific cellular signaling pathways. The KEGG pathway maps are now integrated with network variation maps in the NETWORK database, as well as with conserved functional units of KEGG modules and reaction modules in the MODULE database. The KO database for functional orthologs continues to be improved and virus KOs are being expanded for better understanding of virus-cell interactions and for enabling prediction of viral perturbations.