Application to Molecular Biology 

Objectives 

As the amount of molecular biological data is explosively increasing, it is 
necessary to develop automatic analysis and to represent various knowledge as 
rules that can be automatically utilized. The knowledge in protein databases 
that needs to be represented is as follows. 

Protein Function Representation 

Integrated Representation of Existing Public Databases 

Tentative Representation of Unclassified Data 


Advantages of Quixote

The advantages of Quixote are shown through our demonstration, except 
for a couple of the advantages of using modules as follows: 

Intrinsic knowledge of substance/species, and every public database 

Partitioning of inconsistent data 


Outline of Demonstration 

ProSite 
Show how the zinc finger (a kind of functional motif) is represented and 
used in Quixote, in comparison with the relational model. 

   - Flexibility of Schema 
   - Query Processing Facility 

Functions of Cytochromes 
Show how the electron transfer of cytochromes (metabolic reaction) is 
represented in Quixote, by using the module and subsumption relation. 

   - Precision Customization of Answer by Module Facility 
   - Thesaurus Representation by Object Hierarchy 

Citric Acid Cycle 
Show how the metabolic pathways are represented in Quixote, by showing 
the differences between the citric acid cycle and the glyoxylate cycle, both 
of which are metabolic reactions. 

   - Representation of Path with Loops 



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