  The availability of databases electronically encoding curated regulatory
networks and of high-throughput technologies and methods to discover regulatory
interactions provides an invaluable source of data to understand the principles
underpinning the organization and evolution of these networks responsible for
cellular regulation. Nevertheless, data on these sources never goes beyond the
regulon level despite the fact that regulatory networks are complex
hierarchical-modular structures still challenging our understanding. This
brings the necessity for an inventory of systems across a large range of
organisms, a key step to rendering feasible comparative systems biology
approaches. In this work, we take the first step towards a global understanding
of the regulatory networks organization by making a cartography of the
functional architectures of diverse bacteria. Abasy (Across-bacteria systems)
Atlas provides a comprehensive inventory of annotated functional systems,
global network properties, and systems-level elements (global regulators,
modular genes shaping functional systems, basal machinery genes, and
intermodular genes) predicted by the natural decomposition approach for
reconstructed and meta-curated regulatory networks across a large range of
bacteria, including pathogenically and biotechnologically relevant organisms.
The meta-curation of regulatory datasets provides the most complete and
reliable set of regulatory interactions currently available. Abasy Atlas
contains systems and system-level elements for 50 regulatory networks
comprising 78,649 regulatory interactions covering 42 bacteria in nine taxa,
containing 3,708 regulons and 1,776 systems. All this brings together a large
corpus of data that will surely inspire studies to generate hypothesis
regarding the principles governing the evolution and organization of systems
and the functional architectures controlling them.
