The executive teams of five major molecular interaction databases announced today the signing of an agreement to share curation efforts and exchange completed records through a mechanism known as the International Molecular Exchange (IMEx) consortium. IMEx will provide a network of stable, synchronized and freely accessible databases, and will serve as a way to jointly capture all published molecular interaction data in a manner similar to the successful global collaborations for protein and DNA sequences and for macromolecular structures.

"In deciding to map the biomolecular interactions that define life itself, one quickly realizes how daunting a task we have set for ourselves," says Henning Hermjakob, principal investigator of the IntAct molecular interactions database at EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute. "All along, however, we saw this project as a collaborative task between our own group and the global scientific community. Thus, it made perfect sense to combine our efforts with those of our colleagues working at other centres."

Participating databases as of August 2005 are:

• BIND (www.blueprint.org) The Blueprint Initiative Asia Pte. Ltd, Singapore and The Blueprint Initiative North America,Toronto Canada;
• DIP (http://dip.doe-mbi.ucla.edu/), UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics & Proteomics, Los Angeles, USA;
• IntAct (www.ebi.ac.uk/intact), EMBLEuropean Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, UK;
• MINT (http://mint.bio.uniroma2.it/mint/) University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Rome Italy; and
• MPact (http://mips.gsf.de/genre/proj/mpact), MIPS / Institute for Bioinformatics, Munich, Germany.

It is anticipated that further databases will join the consortium in the near future.
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Contact: Sarah Sherwood
sherwood@embl.de
49-622-138-7125
European Molecular Biology Laboratory
29-Aug-2005

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