The goal of the BioPAX group is to develop a common exchange format for biological pathways data.

The BioPAX project began at the Fourth BioPathways Consortium Meeting, a satellite of the ISMB'02 Conference held in Edmonton, Canada in August 2002. It was decided that a pathway exchange format would facilitate sharing of pathway information between databases and users and would be a good first step to building an open source pathway information resource. The project got underway in early October 2002 when Chris Hogue (BIND, UToronto), Peter Karp (BioCyc, SRI), and Chris Sander (MSKCC) organized the BioPAX work group.

It was decided to keep the group small at first, and to expand it gradually. The initial focus of the group was the exchange of chemical compound information; and initial group members were selected with this in mind.

The first BioPAX meeting was held on November 6, 2002 in New York City. During this meeting the group worked to identify the steps needed to arrive at a viable data exchange format. They also reviewed the work of other relevant groups, developed a timeline for inclusion of additional members to the BioPAX group, and began working on the problem of exchanging chemical compound information, followed by metabolic pathway representation.

Current BioPAX development is tracked on the BioPAX wiki.

Level 1: Gary D. Bader, Erik Brauner, Michael P. Cary, Robert Goldberg, Chris Hogue^*, Peter Karp, Joanne Luciano, Debbie Marks, Natalia Maltsev, Eric Neumann^*, Suzanne Paley, John Pick, Aviv Regev, Andrey Rzhetsky, Chris Sander, Vincent Schachter^*, Imran Shah, Mustafa Syed, Jeremy Zucker

Level 2: Mirit Aladjem, Gary D. Bader, Michael P. Cary, Kam Dahlquist, Emek Demir, Peter D'Eustachio, Ken Fukuda, Frank Gibbons, Marc Gillespie, Chris Hogue^*, Michael Hucka, Geeta Joshi-Tope, David Kane, Peter Karp, Christian Lemer, Joanne Luciano, Natalia Maltsev, Eric Neumann^*, Suzanne Paley, Elgar Pichler, Jonathan Rees, Alan Ruttenberg, Andrey Rzhetsky, Chris Sander, Vincent Schachter^*, Andrea Splendiani, Mustafa Syed, Edgar Wingender, Guanming Wu, Jeremy Zucker

Level 3: Gary Bader, Michael Cary, Emek Demir, Sarala Dissanayake, Ugur Dogrusoz, Ramon Felciano, Ken Fukuda, Akira Funahashi, Igor Goryanin, Susumu Goto, Matthew Horridge, Michael Hucka, Samuel Kerrien, Hiroaki Kitano, Nicolas Le Novère, Christian Lemer, Joanne Luciano, Stuart Moodie, Poul Nielsen, Victoria Petri, Harsha Rajasimha, Ranjani Ramakrishnan, Alan Ruttenberg, Chris Sander, Frank Schacherer, Carl Schaefer, Anatoly Sorokin, Andrea Splendiani, Paul Thomas, Imre Vastrik, Jeremy Zucker

BioPAX is coordinated by Chris Sander's group in the Computational Biology Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (biopax-info@biopax.org) in collaboration with many of the above participants.

* - These members are only in e-mail and phone contact; all others have attended BioPAX development workshops.

Representatives from a number of existing databases have been involved in the BioPAX effort, including:

aMAZE

BioCyc

BIND

eMIM

INOH

PATIKA

Reactome

WIT/PUMA2

Proteomics Standards Initiative

Chemical Markup Language

SBML

CellML

Department of Energy - Workshop Grant #DE-FG02-04ER63931