An important distinction, which applies generally to biological databases, was made between GenBank which is an archival resource, and RefSeq that is a derived database that can continually improve its records.
Even though important efforts have been undertaken by the National Commission for the Use and Knowledge of Biodiversity (CONABIO –Comisión Nacional para el Uso y Conocimiento de la Biodiversidad) in creating biological databases for Mexico, currently important geographical areas still lack amphibian collection data [19].
The important consideration when using expert knowledge from biological databases is to harness this information in a way that makes sense to the biologist.
With the rapid explosion of chemical 'big' data from HTS and combinatorial synthesis, machine learning has become an indispensable tool for drug designers to mine chemical information from large compound databases to design drugs with important biological properties.
Biological databases have consequently become an important tool in assisting scientists to understand and explain biological molecules and processes, in addition to their interactions.
Therefore, for complete information about a data set, it is important that users can easily access relevant publications from biological databases, and conversely, access the relevant biological database entry from a publication describing a specific data set.
Further, networking with existing biological databases like PROSITE [ 21- 24] delivers important information about protein domains, families and functional sites as well as associated patterns and profiles to identify them.
One of the most important aspects of wildlife forensic DNA analyses, from a training perspective, is the expansion of all the techniques and databases established for wildlife forensic purposes into important biological and management questions for game and endangered species.
With the explosively growing data scale, the development of biological databases incorporating different species has become a very important theme in big data biology.
However, an important challenge for us, as well as curators at many other biological databases, is finding a way to handle the ever-increasing number of publications with limited curation resources.
