Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference Plant & Animal Genomes XIII ConferenceJanuary 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
Pavana Polineni2,1 , Prathyusha Aragonda1 , Suresh R. Xavier1 , Richard Furuta2 , David L. Adelson1
Many important agricultural traits such as weight gain, milk fat content and intramuscular fat (marbling) in cattle are quantitative traits. While significant information regarding the mode of inheritance of these traits is available, most of this information is not integrated into a genomic context. As large amounts of genomic sequence data become available (estimated completion time of the bovine genome sequence is July 2005), they require livestock genome researchers to integrate sequence data not only with existing gene maps, but more importantly with Quantitative Trait Locus (QTL) and phenotype data. Without integration, application of these data to agricultural enterprise productivity will remain slow and inefficient. In order to facilitate this overall integration, there is a requirement for an integrated database of QTL of cattle and an analytical tool for this database such as a visualization component.
While there are livestock genetic map viewers (Hu et al., 2001; Kappes et al., 1997) and at least one QTL database (Weiss et al., 1995), to the best of our knowledge there is only one other bovine QTL viewer available (Khatkar et al., 2004a) that is not dynamic and is restricted to one meta-analysis of dairy QTL data (Khatkar et al., 2004b). We have created a web accessible, integrated database of bovine QTL that can be extended to link to genome sequence data as it becomes available. Our QTL viewer (http://bovineqtl.tamu.edu/ ) is able to show the contents of the database in a manner suitable for both novice and expert users.