Abstract: Modern 'omics'-technologies result in huge amounts of data about
life processes. For analysis and data mining purposes this data has to be
considered in the context of the underlying biological networks. This work
presents an approach for integrating data from biological experiments into
metabolic networks by mapping the data onto network elements and visualising
the data enriched networks automatically. This methodology is implemented in DBE, an information system
that supports the analysis and visualisation of experimental data in the
context of metabolic networks. It consists of five parts: (1) the
DBE-Database for consistent data storage, (2) the Excel-Importer
application for the data import, (3) the DBE-Website as the interface for
the system, (4) the DBE-Pictures application for the up- and download of
binary (e.g. image) files, and (5) DBE-Gravisto, a network analysis and
graph visualisation system. The usability of this approach is demonstrated in two examples.
Keywords: metabolic networks, visualisation, metabolic profiling, information system, data integration
