ADMIN Dec 31, 2017
The BIG Data Center at Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) was officially founded in 2016, with the aim to provide freely open access to a suite of database resources in support of worldwide research activities in both academia and industry.
Since the publication of its first paper (The BIG Data Center: from deposition to integration to translation) in Nucleic Acids Research in October 2016, the BIG Data Center has been continually expanding, updating and enriching its core resources through big-data integration and value-added curation. The recent progresses have been accepted for publication by Nucleic Acids Research, which indicates that the important role of BIG Data Center in big biological data collection and sharing around the world is highly recognized by international counterparts.
Four new database resources have been constructed by the BIG Data Center, BioCode, a repository archiving bioinformatics tool codes; BioProject, a biological project library; BioSample, a biological sample library, and ICG, a knowledgebase of Internal Control Genes for RT-qPCR normalization.
Also, the core databases (Genome Sequence Archive, Genome Warehouse, Genome Variation Map, Gene Expression Nebulas, Methylation Bank, Science Wikis) have been updated and enriched.
In addition, three featured web services are provided, BIG Search, a scalable inter-domain text search engine; BIG SSO, a user access control system to gain access to multiple independent systems with a single ID and password, and Gsub, a unified submission service for all relevant resources.
Data provider of BIG Search includes not only all database resources hosted at the BIG Data Center but also seven partner databases, viz., AnimalTFDB. All of these resources are publicly accessible through the home page of the BIG Data Center.
This work was supported by Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; National Key Research Program of China; National Programs for High Technology Research and Development etc.