A dynamic two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis database: Themycobacterial proteome via Internet

Proteome analysis by two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (2- D PAGE) and mass spectrometry, in combination with protein chemical methods , is a powerful approach for the analysis of the protein composition of com plex biological samples. Data organization is imperative for efficient hand ling of the vast amount of information generated. Thus we have constructed a 2-D PAGE database to store and compare protein patterns of cell-associate d and culture-supernatant proteins of different mycobacterial strains. In a ccordance with the guidelines for federated 2-DE databases, we developed a program that generates a dynamic 2-D PAGE database for the World-Wide-Web t o organise and publish, via the internet, our results from proteome analysi s of different Mycobacterium tuberculosis as well as Mycobacterium bovis BC G strains. The uniform resource locator for the database is http://www.mpii b-berlin.mpg.de/2D-PAGE and can be read with a Java compatible browser. The interactive hypertext markup language documents displayed are generated dy namically in each individual session from a rational data file, a 2-D gel i mage file and a map file describing the protein spots as polygons. The prog ram consists of common gateway interface scripts written in PERL, minimizin g the administrative workload of the database. Furthermore, the database fa cilitates not only interactive use, but also worldwide active participation of other scientific groups with their own data, requiring only minimal com puter hardware and knowledge of information technology.