The proposed Bioinformatics Core will work closely with the biological users by providing a customized laboratory sample tracking system, an efficient and quick data pipeline, a tailored project management system, and a web portal to facilitate sharing of experimental results. In addition, the worldwide scientific community will be able to search and download from the completed database through this web portal. A top priority and a major benefit to the users will be custom written analysis software to address the specific needs of the investigators. One project is the development of an intercellular protein / peptide predictor that predicts prohormone cleavage; this facilitates the accurate prediction of the final enzymatic products. This predictor will provide a valuable link between genetic information coding for the long protein prohormones and the products one observes. NeuroProSightPTM will be developed, which is a bioinformatics tool that identifies PTMs in intact proteins through a "top-down" analysis of absolute masses. The top-down approach will enable investigators to use absolute masses of intact proteins to identify neuropeptides, cytokines, hormones, and other intercellular signaling. In addition, bioinformatics tools will be written to comprehensively compare data from both microarrays and proteomics experimentation using a range of animal models to gain a better understanding of relationships between the transcriptome and proteome. Together these exciting bioinformatics advances will create new tools to provide new approaches to study intercellular signaling proteins of the brain - essentially theorizing and experimenting "out of the box".