BioPAX


BioPAX is a RDF/OWL-based
standard language to represent biological pathways
at the molecular and cellular level. Its major use is to facilitate the exchange of pathway data.
Pathway data captures our understanding of biological processes, but
its rapid growth necessitates development of databases and computational tools to aid
interpretation. However, the current fragmentation of pathway information across many
databases with incompatible formats presents barriers to its effective use. BioPAX solves this
problem by making pathway data substantially easier to collect, index, interpret and share.
BioPAX can represent metabolic and signaling pathways, molecular and genetic interactions and
gene regulation networks. BioPAX was created through a community process. Through BioPAX,
millions of interactions organized into thousands of pathways across many organisms, from a
growing number of sources, are available. Thus, large amounts of pathway data are available in a
computable form to support visualization, analysis and biological discovery.
It is supported by a variety of online databases and tools. The latest released version is BioPAX Level 3. There is also an effort to create a version of BioPAX as part of OBO.

Governance and development

The next version of BioPAX, Level 4, is being developed by a community of researchers. Development is coordinated by board of editors and facilitated by various BioPAX work groups.
Systems Biology Pathway Exchange is an extension for Level 3 and proposal for Level 4 to add quantitative data and systems biology terms. SBPAX export has been implemented by the pathway databases Signaling Gateway Molecule Pages and the SABIO-Reaction Kinetics Database. SBPAX import has been implemented by the cellular modeling framework Virtual Cell.
Other proposals for Level 4 include improved support for Semantic Web, validation and visualization.

Databases with BioPAX Export

Online databases offering BioPAX export include:
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Software supporting BioPAX include: