Erythrodb: A Multi-Omic Visual Knowledge Base for the Human Red Blood Cell

As the life sciences have embraced the information age, we have witnessed the birth of many outstanding resources such as BioCyc, UniProt, the Protein Databank, and KEGG. With the continued generation of -omics data, we are faced with challenges in contextualizing, visualizing, and extracting information from these data. Here, we present ErythroDB (http://erythrodb.org), a multi-omic visual knowledge base for the biochemistry and metabolism of the human red blood cell with applications for transfusion medicine. This resource contains three primary forms of content: (1) an interactive metabolic map enhanced with data from the literature and information from external databases, (2) an interactive “bibliome” that contains manually-curated literature on red blood cell metabolism and storage, and (3) a data repository that provides access to published -omics data sets. ErythroDB captures the true systems aspect of physiology by allowing multiple data sources to be visualized together. Moving forward, contextualizing findings with a systems-level view will help synthesize knowledge generated by the community, eventually leading to a better understanding of red blood cell physiology.