**7. Conclusion**

The objective of this work was to develop a system for integrating biological data with an application on familial hypercholesterolemia disease. Such a system should facilitate access to multiple data sources available on the Web, in a transparent and uniform way, giving biologists a single virtual source that summarizes all relevant data sources for the application.

This chapter describes the solution adopted to achieve such a system, where the main elements have been identified, and a computer deployment scenario developed. Among different existing integration approaches, we adopted the mediator approach to integrate data sources. In this approach the most important step is the construction of the global schema as the mediator has to process queries at runtime in order to integrate data sources. We first studied the biologists' needs by exploring different scenarios and we identified with their help various data sources involved.

A study of these sources was necessary in order to build our global schema. From the diagram established, we formulated our SQL query as we built various adapters associated with different sources and at the end we have submitted this request to the mediator for treatment.

As prospects, we have to implement and test this solution and combine the final result of the mediator and that of the tool CHARMM before presenting to the user.

We are currently expanding the platform by integrating other proteins involved in cardiovascular diseases which are the main cause of mortality in the world. In particular, we are investigating a protein called paraoxonase-1 (PON1) which plays an important role in the cardiovascular diseases prevention.

PON1 is an HDL associated enzyme synthesized in the liver and distributed in the blood. It catalyzes the hydrolysis of modified lipids in both HDL (known as good cholesterol) and LDL (known as bad cholesterol) particles and protects them from oxidative modifications, and subsequently reducing the risk of atherosclerosis.

Further bioinformatics analysis including molecular simulations are performed on the PON1 enzyme to better understand the structure activity relationship and also to explore the mutated proteins (genetic polymorphism associated with heart disease) responsible for the weak activity revealed trough the clinical study in both diabetic and coronary patients from Morocco.
