Motivation: The increasing availability of biological databases on the World-Wide Web and hypertext links between them has made a wealth of information easily accessible to biologists. Additional retrieval capabilities can be achieved by storing explicitly specified biological relationships between different entities as discrete database entries.
Results: We have built CySPID, a prototype database about the cytoskeleton that explores the approach of explicitly representing biological relationships. The stored relationships are displayed along with other retrieved information, can be used to make hyperlinks to related entities, and can be used to search for entities with specified properties. CySPID is extensible in that new types of relationships may be created without altering the database schema.
Availability: CySPID is available for public use (http://ycmi.med.yale.edu/cyspid/). The CGI scripts used by CySPID are available upon request.