Life science researchers are experiencing a “data explosion” due to vast amounts of raw data being produced genomic, proteomic, and structure predicting experimentation. This exponential growth curve is expected to continue. These piles of data are kept in different databases scattered across the diverse industries, different universities and research institutes throughout the world. There is a dire need for the creation of intelligent database of these databases to query, collect, link, merge, analyze and give biological sense to these different data to tackle more and more intricate and challenging scientific problems. An imperative resource for finding biological databases is a special annual issue of the journal Nucleic Acids Research (NAR).which is freely available and categorizes many of the publicly available on line databases related to biology and bioinformatics. Although a huge variety of database are available online, PubMed maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI); Ensembl maintained by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and the Wellcome Trust; the UCSC Genome Browser a human, mouse and rat genome browser maintained by David Haussler’s group at the University of California at Santa Cruz; FlyBase maintained by the FlyBase Consortium; WormBas, and the Gene Ontology (GO) database exemplify some of the major biological databases. Many researchers are not aware of their availability and consequently these databases were not effectively utilized. A better solution would to generate a database of database which contains a plethora of information of various biological databases, maintaining the scientific and political independence of the databases, but allowing the information that they contain to be easily integrated to enable cross-database queries.This study deals with the features of four major metabases of biological databases – DBD (database of biological databases) http://www.biodbs.info/, DOD – Database of Databases (http://www.progenebio.in /DoD/DoD.htm), MetaBase - The Database of Biological Database (http://biodatabase.org) and DBcat (http://www.infobiogen.fr/services/dbcat). ...
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