Nuclear Receptor Signaling Atlas (www.nursa.org): hyperlinking the nuclear receptor signaling community

The nuclear receptor signaling (NRS) field has generated a substantial body of information on nuclear receptors, their ligands and coregulators, with the ultimate goal of constructing coherent models of the biological and clinical significance of these molecules. As a component of the Nuclear Receptor Signaling Atlas (NURSA)--the development of a functional atlas of nuclear receptor biology--the NURSA Bioinformatics Resource is developing a strategy to organize and integrate legacy and future information on these molecules in a single web-based resource (www.nursa.org). This entails parallel efforts of (i) developing an appropriate software framework for handling datasets from NURSA laboratories and (ii) designing strategies for the curation and presentation of public data relevant to NRS. To illustrate our approach, we have described here in detail the development of a web-based interface for the NURSA quantitative PCR nuclear receptor expression dataset, incorporating bioinformatics analysis which provides novel perspectives on functional relationships between these molecules. We anticipate that the free and open access of the community to a platform for data mining and hypothesis generation strategies will be a significant contribution to the progress of research in this field.