PALM-IST: Pathway Assembly from Literature Mining--an Information Search Tool

Manual curation of biomedical literature has become extremely tedious process due to its exponential growth in recent years. To extract meaningful information from such large and unstructured text, newer and more efficient mining tool is required. Here, we introduce PALM-IST, a computational platform that not only allows users to explore biomedical abstracts using keyword based text mining but also extracts biological entity (e.g., gene/protein, drug, disease, biological processes, cellular component, etc.) information from the extracted text and subsequently mines various databases to provide their comprehensive inter-relation (e.g., interaction, expression, etc.). PALM-IST constructs protein interaction network and pathway information data relevant to the text search using multiple data mining tools and assembles them to create a meta-interaction network. It also analyzes scientific collaboration by extraction and creation of "co-authorship network," for a given search context. Hence, this useful combination of literature and data mining provided in PALM-IST can be used to extract novel protein-protein interaction (PPI), to generate meta-pathways and further to identify key crosstalk and bottleneck proteins. PALM-IST is available at www.hpppi.iicb.res.in/ctm.