BackgroundThe innate immune response is the first line of defence against invading pathogens and is regulated by complex signalling and transcriptional networks. Systems biology approaches promise to shed new light on the regulation of innate immunity through the analysis and modelling of these networks. A key initial step in this process is the contextual cataloguing of the components of this system and the molecular interactions that comprise these networks. InnateDB (http://www.innatedb.com) is a molecular interaction and pathway database developed to facilitate systems-level analyses of innate immunity.ResultsHere, we describe the InnateDB curation project, which is manually annotating the human and mouse innate immunity interactome in rich contextual detail, and present our novel curation software system, which has been developed to ensure interactions are curated in a highly accurate and data-standards compliant manner. To date, over 13,000 interactions (protein, DNA and RNA) have been curated from the biomedical literature. Here, we present data, illustrating how InnateDB curation of the innate immunity interactome has greatly enhanced network and pathway annotation available for systems-level analysis and discuss the challenges that face such curation efforts. Significantly, we provide several lines of evidence that analysis of the innate immunity interactome has the potential to identify novel signalling, transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulators of innate immunity. Additionally, these analyses also provide insight into the cross-talk between innate immunity pathways and other biological processes, such as adaptive immunity, cancer and diabetes, and intriguingly, suggests links to other pathways, which as yet, have not been implicated in the innate immune response.ConclusionsIn summary, curation of the InnateDB interactome provides a wealth of information to enable systems-level analysis of innate immunity.

Anti-apoptotic proteins are involved in modulating the process of apoptosis. Here, we report the identification of the previously uncharacterized transmembrane domain protein 85 (TMEM85) as a novel anti-apoptotic sequence. Using growth and viability assays, we demonstrate that the heterologous expression of human TMEM85 in yeast promotes growth and prevents cell death in response to oxidative stress. Overexpression of the yeast TMEM85 ortholog (YGL231c) also leads to increased resistance to oxidative stress. Analysis of the existing TMEM85 DNA complimentary to mRNAs revealed that the human TMEM85 gene is alternatively spliced to produce multiple transcripts and proteins. Thus TMEM85 is a complex gene that encodes a novel conserved anti-apoptotic protein.