text: Given the genetic makeup of an organism, the complete set of possible reactions constitutes its reactome. Reactome, located at http://www.reactome.org is a curated, peer-reviewed resource of human biological processes/pathway data. The basic unit of the Reactome database is a reaction; reactions are then grouped into causal chains to form pathways The Reactome data model allows us to represent many diverse processes in the human system, including the pathways of intermediary metabolism, regulatory pathways, and signal transduction, and high-level processes, such as the cell cycle. Reactome provides a qualitative framework, on which quantitative data can be superimposed. Tools have been developed to facilitate custom data entry and annotation by expert biologists, and to allow visualization and exploration of the finished dataset as an interactive process map. Although the primary curational domain is pathways from Homo sapiens, electronic projections of human pathways onto other organisms are regularly created via putative orthologs, thus making Reactome relevant to model organism research communities. The database is publicly available under open source terms, which allows both its content and its software infrastructure to be freely used and redistributed. Studying whole transcriptional profiles and cataloging protein–protein interactions has yielded much valuable biological information, from the genome or proteome to the physiology of an organism, an organ, a tissue or even a single cell. The Reactome database containing a framework of possible reactions which, when combined with expression and enzyme kinetic data, provides the infrastructure for quantitative models, therefore, an integrated view of biological processes, which links such gene products and can be systematically mined by using bioinformatics applications. Reactome data available in a variety of standard formats, including BioPAX, SBML and PSI-MI, and also enable data exchange with other pathway databases, such as the Cycs, KEGG and amaze, and molecular interaction databases, such as BIND and HPRD. The next data release will cover apoptosis, including the death receptor signaling pathways, and the Bcl2 pathways, as well as pathways involved in hemostasis. Other topics currently under development include several signaling pathways, mitosis, visual phototransduction and hematopoeisis. In summary, Reactome provides high-quality curated summaries of fundamental biological processes in humans in a form of biologist-friendly visualization of pathways data, and is an open-source project.