INTRODUCTION
T1DBase (http://T1DBase.org) is a public website and database that supports the type 1 diabetes (T1D) research community. T1DBase collects information from public sources and collaborating investigators, integrates this information, and presents it in a form that is useful for, and accessible to, T1D researchers. It is analogous to a model organism database but is focused on a specific disease rather than a specific organism. The site contains multiple semi-independent datasets that are curated independently (in some cases by external collaborators), and then unified using integration software developed for this purpose. Figure 1 shows the homepage. All data are open access and all software is open source.
T1DBase is a merger of two separate projects: one at the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB), which was explicitly funded by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation to create a public resource; the other at the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation/Wellcome Trust Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory (DIL) of the University of Cambridge, whose mission is to develop tools and methods to integrate genomic and genetic data and improve cost-effectiveness in the search for T1D susceptibility genes (1).
T1D is an autoimmune disease in which the insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells are selectively destroyed. T1D is the second most common form of diabetes with a prevalence of 0.4% in Caucasians (OMIM:222100). The disease is caused by a combination of environmental and genetic factors. While most cases are non-familial, disease risk is dramatically higher (15 times) for siblings of an affected individual; many lines of research confirm that the increased risk is at least partially genetic (2). The HLA region on chromosome 6 confers 40–50% of the genetic susceptibility with lesser contributions from the three other known loci: INS (3), CTLA4 (4) and LYP/PTPN22 (5). It has been estimated that there could be an additional 50 detectable susceptibility loci which are yet to be identified (W. Y. S. Wang, B. J. Barratt, D. G. Clayton and J. A. Todd, submitted for publication).
The major animal models for T1D are the nonobese diabetic (NOD) mouse, and the BB rat. In addition, research on beta cell function is also carried out on non-diabetic mouse and rat strains.
At present, T1DBase is focused on the molecular genetics and biology of T1D susceptibility and pathogenesis. This represents ∼15% of current T1D research and involves more than 1000 investigators, based on a survey of T1D publications.