PotatoG-DKB: a potato gene-disease knowledge base mined from biological literature

Potato is the fourth largest food crop in the world, but potato cultivation faces serious threats from various diseases and pests. Despite significant advancements in research on potato disease resistance, these findings are scattered across numerous publications. For researchers, obtaining relevant knowledge by reading and organizing a large body of literature is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Therefore, systematically extracting and organizing the relationships between potato genes and diseases from the literature to establish a potato gene-disease knowledge base is particularly important. Unfortunately, there is currently no such gene-disease knowledge base available.

In this study, we constructed a Potato Gene-Disease Knowledge Base (PotatoG-DKB) using natural language processing techniques and large language models. We used PubMed as the data source and obtained 2,906 article abstracts related to potato biology, extracted entities and relationships between potato genes and related disease, and stored them in a Neo4j database. Using web technology, we also constructed the Potato Gene-Disease Knowledge Portal (PotatoG-DKP), an interactive visualization platform.

PotatoG-DKB encompasses 22 entity types (such as genes, diseases, species, etc.) of 5,206 nodes and 9,443 edges between entities (for example, gene-disease, pathogen-disease, etc.). PotatoG-DKP can intuitively display associative relationships extracted from literature and is a powerful assistant for potato biologists and breeders to understand potato pathogenesis and disease resistance. More details about PotatoG-DKP can be obtained at https://www.potatogd.com.cn/.