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‡These authors contributed equally to this work. Obesity is a major cause of morbidity and mortality and is associated with risks for type 2 diabetes mellitus, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, hypertension, stroke, and certain forms of cancer. The glutamate decarboxylase 2 (GAD2), insulin-induced gene 2 (INSIG2), ectonucleotide pyrophosphatase/phosphodiesterase 1 (ENPP1), melanocortin 4 receptor (MC4R), fresh touring origination (FTO), and uncoupling protein-1 (UCP-1) genes have been investigated for their association with obesity. Since the A-3826G SNP in the UCP-1 (uncoupling protein-1) gene was first shown to be the key genetic determinant of obesity and body fat accumulation, many studies have been performed in various populations to measure the association of the G allele of this SNP with obesity phenotypes. The association of the A-3826G single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) with obesity has been controversial, however, suggesting that one SNP does not sufficiently explain the effects of ge nomic variation on body fat accumulation. In this study, 9 SNPs were newly identified in the 5’-flanking region of the UCP-1 gene by direct sequencing of genomic DNA from 21 Korean subjects, and 6 haplotypes were obtained by SNP genotyping and haplotype reconstruction. According to our haplotype analysis, ht2 of the G allele of A-3826G, was signifi cantly associated with overall fat measures after age and body weight were adjusted. Ht6 of the A allele of A-3826G, was significantly linked to reduced fat accumulation. These re sults provide an explanation for the controversies that have been reported in many obesity association studies and suggest that haplotype associations between polymorphic loci and neighbor loci that harbor functional sequence variants can be exploited to identify diseasepredisposing alleles.

Diabetes Mellitus (DM), often simply referred to as diabetes, has developed into a major health concern affecting more than 200 million people worldwide with approximately 4 million deaths per year attributed to the presence of the disease. Diabetes mellitus is categorized as Type 1 and Type 2, where Type 1 diabetes represents a lack of insulin production, and Type 2 diabetes is characterized by a relative lack of insulin receptor (i.e., decreased sensitivity to the effect of insulin) and cased by a complex interplay between genetic factors and environmental factors. Up to date, various studies on the pathology and mechanism in terms of genetic experiments have been conducted and approximately hundreds of genes were reported as diabetes mellitus associated genes. At this point, to support studies on the cause and mechanism of diabetes mellitus, an efficient database system to provide genetic variants related to diabetes mellitus is needed. DMBase is an integrated web-based genetic information resource for diabetes mellitus designed to service genomic variants, genes, and secondary information derived for diabetes mellitus genetics researchers. The current version of DMBase documents 754 genes with 3056 genetic variants and 66 pathways. It provides many effective search interfaces for retrieving diabetes mellitus and genetic information. A web interface for the DMBase is freely available at http://sysbio.kribb.re.kr/dmBase.

Subject areas: Bioinformatics/Computational biology/Molecular modeling, Medical informatics, General Author contribution: J.H. Kim: Web system construction, Y.U. Kim: System construction and writing, O.S. Bang, M-H Cha, Y.K. Park, S.Y. Lee: Contents support and comments, Y.J. Kim: Subject management and advice *Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to: Y. J. Kim, yjkim8@kribb.re.kr Reviewer: Leeyoung Park, Yonsei University, Republic of Korea. Keun-Joon Park, NIH/KCDC, Republic of Korea. Editor: Keun Woo Lee, Gyeongsang National University, Republic of Korea. Received July 17, 2010; Accepted July 26, 2010; Published July 27, 2010 Citation: Kim J.H., et al. StrokePortal: a Complete Stroke Information Resource Based on Oriental and Western Medicine. IBC 2010, 2:7, 1-3. doi:10.4051/ibc.2010.2.3.0007 Funding: This work was supported by a grant from the Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine (KIOM, K09200), in part by a grant (KGS2210911) from the KRIBB Research Initiative Program, and in part by a grant from the Korea Research Council of Fundamental Science & Technology (NTM1300711) of the Republic of Korea. Competing interests: All authors declare no financial or personal conflict that could inappropriately bias their experiments or writing. Copyright: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License, which freely allows to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles as long as a proper citation is given to the original authors and sources.