Computational approaches to standard-compliant biofilm data for reliable analysis and integration

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2012

Authors

Ana Margarida Sousa (Author) Other; Andreia Ferreira (Author) Other; Nuno F. Azevedo (Author) FEUP; Maria Olívia Pereira (Author) Other; Anália Lourenço (Author) Other

Journal

Title: Journal of integrative bioinformatics

Vol. 9 No. 3

Final page: 203

ISSN: 1613-4516

Publisher: Informationsmanagement in der Biotechnologie e.V. (IMBio e.V.)

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge

Scopus - 4 Citations

Associated Projects

PEst-C/EQB/UI0511/2011 - PROJECTO ESTRATÉGICO - UI 511 - 2011-2012

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-008-P72

DOI: 10.2390/biecoll-jib-2012-203

Abstract (EN): The study of microorganism consortia, also known as biofilms, is associated to a number of applications in biotechnology, ecotechnology and clinical domains. Nowadays, biofilm studies are heterogeneous and data-intensive, encompassing different levels of analysis. Computational modelling of biofilm studies has become thus a requirement to make sense of these vast and ever-expanding biofilm data volumes. The rationale of the present work is a machine-readable format for representing biofilm studies and supporting biofilm data interchange and data integration. This format is supported by the Biofilm Science Ontology (BSO), the first ontology on biofilms information. The ontology is decomposed into a number of areas of interest, namely: the Experimental Procedure Ontology (EPO) which describes biofilm experimental procedures; the Colony Morphology Ontology (CMO) which characterises morphologically microorganism colonies; and other modules concerning biofilm phenotype, antimicrobial susceptibility and virulence traits. The overall objective behind BSO is to develop semantic resources to capture, represent and share data on biofilms and related experiments in a regularized fashion manner. Furthermore, the present work also introduces a framework in assistance of biofilm data interchange and analysis - BiofOmics (http://biofomics.org) - and a public repository on colony morphology signatures - MorphoCol (http://stardust.deb.uminho.pt/morphocol).

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 12