Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

January 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

PigQTLDB - A Pig QTL Database

Hu Zhi-liang¹ , Svetlana Dracheva ² , Wonhee Jang² , Donna Maglott² , John Bastiaansen³ , James M Reecy¹ , Max F Rothschild¹

¹  Department of Animal Science and Center for Integrated Animal Genomics, Iowa State University, 2255 Kildee Hall, Ames, IA 50011, USA

²  National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, Building 45, Room 5As.13B, Bethesda, MD 20892

³  Sygen International

Mapping efforts of quantitative trait loci (QTL) in pigs during the past decade have resulted in hundreds of QTL reported for growth, meat quality, reproduction, disease resistance and other traits. It is a challenge to correctly locate, interpret and compare QTL results from different studies. We developed a relational database (PigQTLDB) to integrate all available pig QTL data in the public domain and thus facilitate the use of QTL data in further studies. We also developed a "trait ontology" to standardize names of traits and to simplify organization of the data. These steps made it possible to compare primary data from diverse sources and methods. Efforts were also made to utilize existing pig map databases and other publicly available data resources (such as PubMed) to avoid redundant developmental work. The PigQTLDB was also designed to include data representing major genes and markers associated with large effect on economically important traits. To date, over 790 QTLs from 78 publications have been curated into the database. Those QTLs cover more than 300 different traits. These data have been submitted to the Gene and Map Viewer resources at NCBI, where the information about markers has been matched to marker records in NCBI's UniSTS database. This allows automatic matching of markers to public sequence data by e-PCR. The data are retrievable from NCBI via Gene, Map Viewer, and UniSTS. All efforts were undertaken to improve integrated functional genomics resources for pigs.