Medical database
Medical knowledge is now stored in around 1000 specialist databases . A distinction is made between literature databases (e.g. MEDLINE ), which contain bibliographical references to journal articles, factual databases (e.g. ChemIDplus or PubChem ), which provide the required knowledge in full text, and image databases (e.g. DERMIS).
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) are among the most important institutions providing medical databases . Both institutions work closely with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
In Germany, the German Institute for Medical Documentation and Information (DIMDI) in Cologne is a central provider of databases. In commercial terms, Dialog is one of the largest providers.
Furthermore, the term medical database also includes those databases with information about patients, e.g. B. patient master data, insurance number, laboratory results, results of imaging tests, etc.
Molecular Biology Database
Molecular biology databases are fact databases that contain a representation of the genome and proteome of humans and other species. In addition to the blood banks and tissue databases, they are among the most important representatives of the biobanks .
There are around 500 public and commercial databases of this kind worldwide . They contain information about the nucleotide sequence of genes or the amino acid sequence of proteins . Information about the function, the structure, the location on the chromosome , the clinical effects of changes and the similarities of biological sequences can also be found there.
With the help of the biological databases, the interplay of biomolecules and thus the entire metabolism of an organism should be explained. This would make the rational fight against diseases and thus the development of pharmaceuticals much easier.
Since the biological knowledge is distributed over many databases (mostly also spatially), it is difficult to guarantee the consistency of the information, which sometimes leads to poor data quality in the biological databases. Help is provided by so-called meta search engines (search engines over many databases) such as Entrez Gene from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) or the bioinformatics harvester .
The GenBank is one of the most important molecular biological databases .
Further examples
- PubMed - an English-language text-based meta-database with medical articles
- Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) - a gene database
- MEDLINE from Ovid Technologies
- German Central Library for Medicine
Web links
- www.meddb.info - detailed compilation of more than 1100 databases from medicine and molecular biology
- Database overview for the fields of biology and medicine in the database information system (DBIS). Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, medicine: 23 free on the web, biology: 25 free on the web
- Nucleic Acids Research Database Collection 2011