NSF Award
9983070
Genomics has provided a great opportunity to identify the entire complement of genes within a diverse collection of organisms and has provided the tools necessary to begin to understand the role these genes play in development, disease, and evolution. The sequencing of Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) has provided a first<br/>glimpse of the collection of transcribed sequences in many organisms, and significant additional information can be obtained by a thorough analysis of the EST data. TIGR's analysis of the world's collection of human EST sequence data, captured in the Gene Indices (<http://www.tigr.org/tdb/tdb.html>), provides assembled<br/>consensus sequences that are of high confidence and represent TIGR's best estimate of the collection of transcribed sequences underlying the ESTs. Based on the techniques developed for analysis of human EST sequences, TIGR maintains Gene Indices for a variety of important model organisms, including the Arabidopsis Gene Index (AtGI), the Rice Gene Index (OGI), the Tomato Gene Index (LGI) and the Potato Gene Index. Together, these Gene Indices represent a unique resource for the comparative analysis of plant genes and may provide insight into gene function, regulation, and evolution. Recent EST sequencing projects in a variety of important crop species have provided the sequence data necessary to create Gene Indices for additional plant species, including Maize (Zea mays) and Soybean (Glycine max). This project will create Gene Indices for these plants, continue to assemble the existing Plant Gene Indices, and make a number of improvements in the Indices, including quarterly releases, expanded annotation, integration with mapping and genomic sequence data, and more robust search capabilities. In addition, the project will generate a set of plant orthologues and develop a web-based presentation allowing the properties of these orthologue sets to be explored. Such a database would provide direct links between the plant EST assemblies and would represent the most extensive catalog of plant orthologues, providing a valuable resource for gene identification, elucidation of functional domains, and analysis of gene and genome evolution.
