PAX of mind for pathway researchers

Scientists seeking to understand the inner workings of cells have access to a multitude of pathway data resources. However, the representations of pathway data within these resources are not consistent or interchangeable. To facilitate easy information retrieval from a wide variety of pathway resources, such as signal transduction, gene regulation, molecular interaction and metabolic pathway databases, a broad effort in the biopathways community called BioPAX was formed. New biological pathway software applications built using the BioPAX standard will be able to integrate knowledge from multiple sources in a coherent and reliable way. This article reports the progress that the BioPAX work-group has made towards building and deploying the BioPAX data-exchange format for biological pathway data.