How was the database validated?
Although the number of databases collecting signaling interactions is constantly growing, many of these databases are proprietary, list only a small number of molecules, or only selected types of pathway components (e.g., protein kinases). Even among the few databases passing these criteria – free for non-profit use, more than 200 molecules, contains all pathway component types – there are currently no gold standards of signal transduction pathways compiled with similar purposes and methods as SignaLink. Due to the absence of appropriate gold standards we compared the human signaling pathways of SignaLink and 3 widely used pathway databases: KEGG, Reactome, and NetPath.
