M phase, also called as cell division, is the most crucial and fundamental affair of the eukaryotic cell cycle (Alberts B et al., 2002). After the chromosomes have been replicated during the S phase, the sister chromatids are separated and distributed into two daughter cells equally and faithfully. Also, each daughter cell receives the almost average and necessary intracellular constituents and organelles from the mother cell. Generally, cell division consists of six stages, including prophase, prometaphase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase and cytokinesis. And the first five stages constituent mitosis (Alberts B et al., 2002). During mitosis, numerous proteins organize protein super-complexes at the three distinct regions of centrosome (Badano JL et al., 2005; Doxsey S et al., 2005a; Doxsey S et al., 2005b; Andersen JS et al., 2003) (spindle pole in budding yeast (Jaspersen SL et al., 2004)), kinetochore/centromere (Chan GK et al., 2005; Fukagawa T et al., 2004; McAinsh AD et al., 2003; Yao X et al., 2000; Yao X et al., 1997; Bloom K et al., 2005) and cleavage furrow/midbody (D'Avino PP et al., 2005; Burgess DR et al., 2005; Glotzer M et al., 2004; Skop AR et al.,2004) (related or homolog structures in plants and budding yeast called as phragmoplast (Otegui MS et al., 2005; Guertin DA et al., 2002) and bud neck (Guertin DA et al., 2002), respectively) spatially and temporally, orchestrating the accomplishment of cell division process.

    Although many proteins have been identified to be localized on centrosome, kinetochore and/or midbody, an integrated resource on this area still remains not to be available. In this work, we have collected all proteins identified to be localized on kinetochore, centrosome, and/or midbody from two fungi (S. cerevisiae and S. pombe) and five animals, including C. elegans, D. melanogaster, X. laevis, M. musculus and H. sapiens. From the related literature of PubMed, numerous proteins have been manually curated to be localized on at least one of the sub-cellular localizations of kinetochore, centrosome and midbody. And to promise the quality of data, based on the rationale of "Seeing is believing" (Bloom K et al., 2005), these proteins have been unambiguously observed under fluorescent microscope as directly supportive evidences. Then an integrated and searchable database MiCroKit - Midbody, Centrosome and Kinetochore has been established. The MiCroKit database is the first integrative resource to pin point most of identified components and related scientific information of midbody, centrosome and kinetochore.

    The version 1.0 of MiCroKit database was set up on Nov. 2nd, 2005, containing 1,065 unique proteins. The MiCroKit version 2.0 was released on Jun. 5th, 2006, with 1,120 entries.

    Currently, the MiCroKit 3.0 database was updated on July 9, 2009, containing 1,489 unique protein entries. The online service of MiCroKit 3.0 was implemented in PHP + MySQL + JavaScript. And the local packages of MiCroKit 3.0 were developed in JAVA 1.5 (J2SE). The database will be updated routinely as new microkit proteins are reported.

MiCroKit 3.0: an integrated database of midbody, centrosome and kinetochore.
Jian Ren, Zexian Liu, Xinjiao Gao, Changjiang Jin, Mingliang Ye, Hanfa Zou, Longping Wen, Zhaolei Zhang, Yu Xue and Xuebiao Yao. Nucleic Acids Research. 2010;38:D155-D160
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