Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference Plant & Animal Genomes XIII ConferenceJanuary 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
Justin T. Reese , Michael L. Lake , R. Shreyas Murthi , Christine G. Elsik
The honey bee (Apis mellifera) genome is being sequenced to at least 6X coverage by the Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Sequencing Center. Funding for sequencing from NHGRI and USDA (10%) stemmed from honey bee’s potential as a model in human health related topics, including social behavior, gerontology, development, immunity and X-chromosome diseases, as well as importance in agriculture as a pollinator of food plants. The honey bee model is also used to address fundamental questions in biology, such as the evolution of haplo-diploidy, insect eusociality and symbolic language. BeeBase is the honey bee model organism database. It currently consists of a Gbrowse-based genome viewer and a CMAP-based comparative map viewer, both modules of the Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD) project. The genome viewer includes tracks for known honey bee genes, predicted gene sets (Ensembl, NCBI, EMBL-Heidelberg), STS markers (Solignac and Hunt linkage maps), honey bee expressed sequence tags, homologs in fruit fly, mosquito and other insects and transposable elements. The honey bee comparative map viewer displays linkage maps and the physical map (genome assembly), highlighting markers that are common among maps. Future enhancements planned for BeeBase are a QTL viewer and a gene expression database. The genome sequence will serve as a reference to link these diverse data types. To connect sequence to biology, we will identify homologs of bee predicted genes, compute gene ontologies and curate literature associated with closely related genes in other model organisms. BeeBase can be accessed at http://racerx00.tamu.edu/PHP/bee_search.php.