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Judith A Blake

Publications and source records attributed to Judith A Blake.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

MGD: the Mouse Genome Database.

The Mouse Genome Database (MGD) (http://www.informatics.jax.org) one component of a community database resource for the laboratory mouse, a key model organism for interpreting the human genome and for understanding human biology. MGD strives to provide an extensively integrated information resource with experimental details annotated from both literature and on-line genomic data sources. MGD curates and presents the consensus representation of genotype (sequence) to phenotype information including highly detailed information about genes and gene products. Primary foci of integration are through representations of relationships between genes, sequences and phenotypes. MGD collaborates with other bioinformatics groups to curate a definitive set of information about the laboratory mouse. Recent developments include a general implementation of database structures for controlled vocabularies and the integration of a phenotype classification system.

Alleles↗

Human disease genes and their cloned mouse orthologs: exploration of the FANTOM2 cDNA sequence data set.

The FANTOM2 cDNA sequence data set is an excellent model to demonstrate the power of large-scale cDNA sequencing, with the goal of providing a full-length transcript sequence for each mouse gene. This data set enhances the use of the mouse as a model for human disease. Here we identify mouse cDNA sequences in the FANTOM2 data set for a set of 67 human disease genes that as of May 2002 had no corresponding mouse cDNA annotated in the Mouse Genome Informatics (MGI) database. These 67 human disease genes include genes related to neurological and eye disorders and cancer. We also present a list of the human disease genes and their cloned mouse orthologs found in two public databases, LocusLink and MGI. Allelic variant and gene functional information available in MGI provides additional information relative to these mouse models, whereas computed sequence-based connections at NCBI support facile navigation through multiple genomes.

Alleles↗

Connecting sequence and biology in the laboratory mouse.

The Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium and the RIKEN Genome Exploration Research grouphave generated large sets of sequence data representing the mouse genome and transcriptome, respectively. These data provide a valuable foundation for genomic research. The challenges for the informatics community are how to integrate these data with the ever-expanding knowledge about the roles of genes and gene products in biological processes, and how to provide useful views to the scientific community. Public resources, such as the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI; http://www.ncbi.nih.gov), and model organism databases, such as the Mouse Genome Informatics database (MGI; http://www.informatics.jax.org), maintain the primary data and provide connections between sequence and biology. In this paper, we describe how the partnership of MGI and NCBI LocusLink contributes to the integration of sequence and biology, especially in the context of the large-scale genome and transcriptome data now available for the laboratory mouse. In particular, we describe the methods and results of integration of 60,770 FANTOM2 mouse cDNAs with gene records in the databases of MGI and LocusLink.

Animals↗

The Mouse Genome Database (MGD): the model organism database for the laboratory mouse.

The Mouse Genome Database (MGD) is the community database resource for the laboratory mouse, a key model organism for interpreting the human genome and for understanding human biology and disease (http://www.informatics.jax.org). MGD strives to provide a highly curated, highly integrated information resource that not only includes the consensus view of current knowledge about the mouse, but also provides comparative genomic information particularly for human and rat genomes. MGD includes extensive information about mouse genes, supporting all gene attribute assertions with experimental data, statements of evidence and citation. Detailed information about alleles and mouse mutants includes genotype, molecular variant and phenotype descriptions. Extensive collaboration with other data providers such as NCBI, RIKEN and SWISS-PROT provides standardization of gene:sequence associations and robust interconnections between large information systems based on shared sequence curation. Recent integration of large datasets of mouse full-length cDNAs and radiation-hybrid mapped ESTs, the continued development and use of extensive structured vocabularies and the expansion of the representation of phenotypes highlight this year's developments.

Alleles↗

Extension and integration of the gene ontology (GO): combining GO vocabularies with external vocabularies.

Structured vocabulary development enhances the management of information in biological databases. As information grows, handling the complexity of vocabularies becomes difficult. Defined methods are needed to manipulate, expand and integrate complex vocabularies. The Gene Ontology (GO) project provides the scientific community with a set of structured vocabularies to describe domains of molecular biology. The vocabularies are used for annotation of gene products and for computational annotation of sequence data sets. The vocabularies focus on three concepts universal to living systems, biological process, molecular function and cellular component. As the vocabularies expand to incorporate terms needed by diverse annotation communities, species-specific terms become problematic. In particular, the use of species-specific anatomical concepts remains unresolved. We present a method for expansion of GO into areas outside of the three original universal concept domains. We combine concepts from two orthogonal vocabularies to generate a larger, more specific vocabulary. The example of mammalian heart development is presented because it addresses two issues that challenge GO; inclusion of organism-specific anatomical terms, and proliferation of terms and relationships. The combination of concepts from orthogonal vocabularies provides a robust representation of relevant terms and an opportunity for evaluation of hypothetical concepts.

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