Integrated DB for bioinformatics: A case study on analysis of functional effect of MiRNA SNPs in cancer

The era of "big data" arose the need to have computational tools in support of biological tasks. Many types of bioinformatics tools have been developed for different biological tasks as target, pathway and gene set analysis, but integrated resources able to incorporate a unique web interface, and to manage a biological scenario involving many different data sources are still lacking. In many bioinformatics approaches several data processing and evaluation steps are required to reach the final results. In this work, we face a biological case study by exploiting the capabilities of an integrated multi-component resources database that is able to deal with complex biological scenarios. As example of our problem-solving approach we provide a case study on the analysis of functional effect of miRNA single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in cancer disease.