The Cellosaurus, a FAIR repository to help researchers navigate the confusing universe of cell lines
This webinar presents the Cellosaurus, a manually curated knowledge resource which aims to describe all cell lines used in biomedical research. It provides information on immortalized, naturally immortal and finite life cell lines. Its taxonomy scope encompasses both vertebrates and invertebrates. Currently it describes over 122,000 cell lines from 684 species. For each cell line it provides a wealth of information, cross‐references and literature citations. The Cellosaurus is available on the ExPASy server (https://web.expasy.org/cellosaurus/) and can be downloaded in different formats under the CC BY 4.0 license.
The Cellosaurus is a key resource to help researchers identify potentially contaminated/misidentified cell lines, thus contributing to improving the quality and reproducibility of research in the life sciences. It is part of the Resource Identification Initiative (RII) which aims to enable resource transparency within the biomedical literature through the use of Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs). Some of the information in the Cellosaurus is uploaded into Wikidata thus allowing semantic connection of cell lines to other biological objects.
We would like to expand its use in the context of the FAIRification of biological data by providing an RDF version of the resource and a SPARQL endpoint query service.