Cellosaurus is an online
knowledge base on
cell lines, which attempts to document all cell lines used in
biomedical research
Medical research (or biomedical research), also known as experimental medicine, encompasses a wide array of research, extending from "basic research" (also called ''bench science'' or ''bench research''), – involving fundamental scientif ...
.
It is provided by the
Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic not-for-profit foundation which federates bioinformatics activities throughout Switzerland.
The institute was established on 30 March 1998 and its mission is to provide core bioinfor ...
(SIB). It is an
ELIXIR Core Data Resource as well as an IRDiRC's Recognized Resource. It is the contributing resource for cell lines on the Resource Identification Portal. As of October 2021, it contains information for approximately 130,000 cell lines.
Its scope includes
immortalised cell line
An immortalised cell line is a population of cells from a multicellular organism which would normally not proliferate indefinitely but, due to mutation, have evaded normal cellular senescence and instead can keep undergoing division. The cells ...
s, naturally immortal cell lines (example:
embryonic stem cells) and finite life cell lines when those are distributed and used widely. The Cellosaurus provides a wealth of manually curated information; for each cell line it lists a recommended name, synonyms and the
species of origin. Other types of information include standardised
disease terminology (for
cancer or
genetic disorder cell lines), the transformant used to immortalise a cell line, transfected or knocked-out genes,
microsatellite instability
Microsatellite instability (MSI) is the condition of genetic hypermutability (predisposition to mutation) that results from impaired DNA mismatch repair (MMR). The presence of MSI represents phenotypic evidence that MMR is not functioning normal ...
,
doubling time The doubling time is the time it takes for a population to double in size/value. It is applied to population growth, inflation, resource extraction, consumption of goods, compound interest, the volume of malignant tumours, and many other things th ...
,
gender and age of donor (patient or animal), important sequence variations, web links, publication references and cross-references to close to 100 different databases, ontologies, cell collections and other relevant resources.
Since many cell lines used in research have been misidentified or
contaminated, the Cellosaurus keeps track of problematic cell lines, including all those listed in the International Cell Line Authentication Committee (ICLAC) tables. For
human as well as some dog cell lines, it provides
short tandem repeat (STR) profile information. Since July 2018, cell lines in the Cellosaurus are represented as items in
Wikidata.
In March 2020, the Cellosaurus created a page containing cell line information relevant to
SARS-CoV-2 in response to the
COVID-19 pandemic.
The Cellosaurus encyclopedia is widely recognized as an authoritative source for cell line information, providing
unique identifiers and as source of
curated information.
References
External links
CellosaurusGitHub directory of CellosaurusRecord in FAIRsharing.orgRecord in Identifiers.org
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Molecular biology
Biological databases
Cell biology
Cell culture