Curating the innate immunity interactome

Here, we describe the InnateDB curation project, which is manually annotating the human and mouse innate immunity interactome in rich contextual detail, and present our novel curation software system, which has been developed to ensure interactions are curated in a highly accurate and data-standards compliant manner. To date, over 13,000 interactions (protein, DNA and RNA) have been curated from the biomedical literature. Here, we present data, illustrating how InnateDB curation of the innate immunity interactome has greatly enhanced network and pathway annotation available for systems-level analysis and discuss the challenges that face such curation efforts. Significantly, we provide several lines of evidence that analysis of the innate immunity interactome has the potential to identify novel signalling, transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulators of innate immunity. Additionally, these analyses also provide insight into the cross-talk between innate immunity pathways and other biological processes, such as adaptive immunity, cancer and diabetes, and intriguingly, suggests links to other pathways, which as yet, have not been implicated in the innate immune response.In summary, curation of the InnateDB interactome provides a wealth of information to enable systems-level analysis of innate immunity.The immune system is traditionally divided into two different branches - the adaptive immune system, the arm of the immune system that mounts a specific response to foreign antigens, and the innate immune system. The importance of the innate immune response is now well recognised as the first, and perhaps even the most critical, line of defence against invading pathogens and there has been an explosion of interest in investigating it. Innate immunity is fast-acting by comparison to the adaptive response, which can take several days to respond, and furthermore, innate immunity instructs, regulates and shapes the subsequent adaptive response [1,2].Despite the lack of