Plant & Animal Genomes XVII Conference

January 10-14, 2009
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

A Review Of The Marine Genomics Project, A Web-Based Genomic And Transcriptional Database

Stephen P Ficklin¹ , Matthew D Cook² , Pamela J Morris² , Jill B Gemmill³ , Robert W Chapman² , Gregory W Warr²

¹  Clemson University Genomics Institute 51 New Cherry St Clemson, SC 29634

²  Marine Biomedicine and Environmental Science Center, Medical University of South Carolina Hollings Marine Laboratory 331 Ft. Johnson Road Charleston SC 29412

³  Cyberinfrastructure Technology Integration Clemson University 340 Computer Court Anderson, SC 29625

The Marine Genomics Project (http://www.marinegenomics.org) serves as a repository for transcriptional information, including ESTs and microarray data for several marine species. Investigators from around the world upload data related to their species of interest. A complement of skilled staff provided valuable bioinformatics analysis to the community during the first several years of the project. Recently, the web site has undergone a major overhaul to utilize community-driven genomic tools, web tools, newly available high-performance computational resources, and improvements to increase the autonomy of site visitors in terms of data-mining capabilities and bioinformatics analysis of online data. Some tools of note include the use of GMOD chado as a database backend, GBrowse for viewing alignment of ESTs in contigs, updated Gene Ontology, a more robust search engine, and an autonomous robust EST processing pipeline integrated with high-performance computing resources. Future efforts include an annotation pipeline with pre-populated in-silico annotations, user-supplied evidence-based annotations, and additional tools and workflows to assist non-technical users in data discovery.