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Osteoporosis is a common, complex disease of bone with a strong heritable component, characterized by low bone mineral density, microarchitectural deterioration of bone tissue and an increased risk of fracture. Due to limited drug selection for osteoporosis and increasing morbidity, mortality of osteoporotic fractures, osteoporosis has become a major health burden in aging societies. Current researches for identifying specific loci or genes involved in osteoporosis contribute to a greater understanding of the pathogenesis of osteoporosis and the development of better diagnosis, prevention and treatment strategies. However, little is known about how most causal genes work and interact to influence osteoporosis. Therefore, it is greatly significant to collect and analyze the studies involved in osteoporosis-related genes. Unfortunately, the information about all these osteoporosis-related genes is scattered in a large amount of extensive literature. Currently, there is no specialized database for easily accessing relevant information about osteoporosis-related genes and miRNAs.

We extracted data from literature abstracts in PubMed by text-mining and manual curation. Moreover, a local MySQL database containing all the data was developed with PHP on a Windows server.

OsteoporosAtlas (http://biokb.ncpsb.org/osteoporosis/), the first specialized database for easily accessing relevant information such as osteoporosis-related genes and miRNAs, was constructed and served for researchers. OsteoporosAtlas enables users to retrieve, browse …