National Center for Genome Resources, 1800-A Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe, NM 87505 USA
The Phytophthora Genome Initiative is a distributed collaboration to study the genome and evolution of a destructive class of plant pathogenic oomycete. Within the genus Phytophthora are about sixty species able to devastate such crops as alfalfa, cucurbits, peppers, strawberry, tobacco, and a variety of tree crops including almonds, apples, avocado, citrus, cocoa and walnuts. Two species of particular interest are P. infestans, a bane to potatoes and tomatoes which results in billions of dollars in crop loss and etiological agent of the Irish potato famine, and P. sojae, which causes extensive damage to soybean crops. We helped start a sequencing initiative to understand and control this pathology, and intend to integrate data from host species, which is necessary to understand a product of a coevolutionary process. In the pilot phase of the initiative, two laboratories prepared P. infestans EST and P. sojae BAC libraries and sent them to a third laboratory for sequencing. Results of sequencing reactions were submitted to NCGR for analysis and curation. The system provides data curation as an extension to the laboratory work flow and automatically performs simple analyses (i.e., vector removal and similarity searching) that can then be retrieved by the investigator. We will demonstrate the analysis and retrieval system, and present a summary of sequencing results to date. The enabling force of a distributed information system that allows scientists to share analyses in real time has not yet been realized. This system was designed for reuse, and could provide support for distributed research 'collaboratories' to help advance agricultural genomics. More details are available at www.ncgr.org/pgi.
Plant & Animal Genome VII Conference Plant & Animal Genome VII Conference