Biomedical Entity Explorer: A Web Server for Biomedical Entity Exploration

J Comput Biol. 2021 Jun;28(6):619-628. doi: 10.1089/cmb.2020.0364. Epub 2021 Jun 2.

Abstract

Biomedical Entity Explorer (BEE) is a web server that can search for biomedical entities from a database of six biomedical entity types (gene, miRNA, drug, disease, single nucleotide polymorphism [SNP], pathway) and their gene associations. The search results can be explored using intersections, unions, and negations. BEE has integrated biomedical entities from 16 databases (Ensemble, PharmGKB, Genetic Home Reference, Tarbase, Mirbase, NCI Thesaurus, DisGeNET, Linked life data, UMLS, GSEA MsigDB, Reactome, KEGG, Gene Ontology, HGVD, SNPedia, and dbSNP) based on their gene associations and built a database with their synonyms, descriptions, and links containing individual details. Users can enter the keyword of one or more entities and select the type of entity for which they want to know the relationship for and by using set operations such as union, negation, and intersection, they can navigate the search results more clearly. We believe that BEE will not only be useful for biologists querying for complex associations between entities, but can also be a good starting point for general users searching for biomedical entities. BEE is accessible at (http://bike-bee.snu.ac.kr).

Keywords: biomedical entity search; database integration; web server.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Search Engine
  • Sequence Analysis / methods
  • Software*