Abstract
BACKGROUND: Cancer is a disease of genome alterations that arise through the acquisition of multiple somatic DNA sequence mutations. Some of these mutations can be critical for the development of a tumor and can be useful to characterize tumor types or predict outcome. DESCRIPTION: We have constructed an integrated biological information system termed the Roche Cancer Genome Database (RCGDB) combining different human mutation databases already publicly available. This data is further extended by hand-curated information from publications.The current version of the RCGDB provides a user-friendly graphical interface that gives access to the data in different ways: (1) Single interactive search by genes, samples, cell lines, diseases, as well as pathways, (2) batch searches for genes and cell lines, (3) customized searches for regularly occurring requests, and (4) an advanced query interface enabling the user to query for samples and mutations by various filter criteria. CONCLUSION: The interfaces of the presented database enable the user to search and view mutations in an intuitive and straight-forward manner. The database is freely accessible at http://rcgdb.bioinf.uni-sb.de/MutomeWeb/.