Figure 1. Schematic Illustrating the Biological Pathway Building Process.

Pathway curators initially mine information (Step 1). The mining process can be initiated by two broad pathway building objectives: (a) DDO wherein a list of genes and/or proteins are obtained by high-throughput experiments such as microarray, mass spectrometry or (b) KDO wherein a broad topic of interest is chosen and then the knowledge concerning this topic is mined from resources such as the primary literature and knowledgebases. Information from the mining process is assembled (Step 2), using pathway building tools, into a pathway, which, following many iterations of feedback from domain experts (Step 3) and refinement (Step 4), leads to the desired specific annotated pathway.