Worm Breeder's Gazette 17(1): 28 (October 1, 2001)
These abstracts should not be cited in bibliographies. Material contained herein should be treated as personal communication and should be cited as such only with the consent of the author.
www.wormbase.org
We are close to having mirror sites at the Sanger Centre and Caltech; see the WormBase homepage for details.
User Interface
The WormBase user interface is still very much evolving. Some
of the changes are:
Genome Browser. The genome browser Genome Hunter has been updated to show predicted and confirmed genes, the precise endpoints of cosmids and YACs, ESTs aligned by BLAT (see below), the regions of genomic sequence corresponding to genes defined by the Worm Transcriptome Project's analysis of Y. Kohara's ESTs, regions of homology to C. briggsae, regions with Prosite domains, the oligos and regions they amplify that have been used in some microarray and RNAi experiments, ESTs, among other features. These features are color-coded in the display. You can check boxes to specify the features you would like to see.
BLAT is a sequence alignment program written by W.J. Kent at UC Santa Cruz. It efficiently scans a pair of DNA sequences for small regions of high identity: those 40 or more bases long with 95% identity, or perfect sequence matches down to 33 bases in length. It is highly useful for aligning cDNAs to genomic DNA, or small genomic fragments to a genome draft.
Genetic Map Viewer. The new genetic map viewer that became available this past spring is Java-based and still not compatible with Macintoshs. We therefore enhanced the classic acedb graphic map display to make it easier to navigate. A new more web-friendly viewer is under development.
Search pages
Genetic Interval Search. A new genetic Interval Search
page takes advantage of the interpolation of genetic and physical maps
at the resolution of individual clones. This search allows you to
specify a range by map position, gene name, or clone, and returns a list
of genes in that region. After determining the range, this script lists
all mapped mutants within the range as well as predicted genes on clones
that have been interpolated into the range. Of course, since not
all genetic loci are mapped relative to one another, the order of genetic
loci presented in chromosomal coordinates may not actually reflect the
physical order of these genes.
RNAi Phenotype Search. An RNAi search page allows you to search for genes for which RNAi experiments have been done. Most of these are from the large scale projects published in the past year, and an increasing set from individual papers. Negative data from all but the EMBL screen are included.
New data
RNAi. In addition to the 147 movies from RNAi experiments
from the Ahringer laboratory (Zipperlen et al., 2001) are now included
in WormBase.
Expression patterns from papers. We are focusing on extracting gene expression patterns from the 4630 papers in the CGC bibliography. We almost half done, and now have with 1297Expr patterns representing about 518 genes. In general, each experiment or cluster of related experiments is described in one Expr object. For example, if a gene's expression has been analyzed by GFP fusions and by antibodies, there will be two Expr objects in wormbase
WTP genes. The regions corresponding to over 10,000 genes from the Worm Transcriptome Project's analysis of EST sequences have been added this summer. The Thierry-Mieg's might have additional information on splicing patterns of individual genes, and you should email them for more information.
WormPep. WormPep is a set of current best inferences about proteins encoded in the C. elegans genome. Since WormPep is now revised weekly, you can obtain the data for previous versions at http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Projects/C_elegans/wormpep/.
Coming Soon
SNPs. The positions of the Washington University SNPs
will be included in the Genome Viewer.
Deletions from the C. elegans Knockout Consortium will
be indicated in the genome viewer and on the Gene report pages.
C. briggsae data. The assembled genomic sequence
from C. briggsae generated by 10x coverage shotgun sequencing at the Sanger
Centre and at the Washington University Genome Sequence Center should be
in WormBase this Fall.
Microarray data. We have started with Stuart Kim's
global analysis of gene expression that clusters genes over about 500 experiments.
Other data will be added in the near future.
Gene Ontology Consortium
WormBase has joined the Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium. GO is
a structured vocabulary allowing the biological functions of gene products
to be described with arbitrarily high levels of detail, and compared between
diverse organisms in a way independent of sequence similarity or idiosyncrasies
of a given model system. More details are available at http://www.geneontology.org.
We have begun incorporating GO terms into Wormbase. The first
step was to automatically generate annotations based on the Interpro repository
of protein sequence motifs, which has become the standard for computational
annotation of protein-encoding portions of whole genomes (e.g., the Arabidopsis
and human genomes). A second step, currently underway, is to automatically
map GO terms onto ~800 genes with mass-produced RNAi phenotypes.
This is being done in collaboration with the WormPD database at Proteome,
Inc. The longer term and most important phase is to manually annotate
each gene with GO terms. During all of this, it is continually necessary
to invent new GO terms specifically fitted to the biology of C. elegans.
Another basic requirement is to develop a logical scheme (ontology) relating
parts of the anatomy; this is being done in collaboration with David Hall
and Zeynep Altun of the Worm Atlas Project.