RELEASE 7 OF THE MENDEL DATABASE: GENE FAMILIES AND PRODUCT FAMILIES

Carl A. Price Commission on Plant Gene Nomenclature Waksman Institute Piscataway, NJ 08854-8020

The Commission on Plant Gene Nomenclature was founded in 1991 with a single mission: to develop a common nomenclature for sequenced plant genes, such that substantially similar genes from across the plant kingdom will carry the same appelation. A major vehicle for that mission is the Mendel database of sequenced plant genes, which lists genes reported to EMBL/GenBank and SwissProt with their CPGN-approved names. Mendel grew from a small, hand-curated database to one nearly contemporary with SwissProt through a semi-automated method for sorting protein sequences into non-overlapping sets developed by David Lonsdale and his associates at the John Innes Centre. Although these sequence sets usually correspond to gene families as recognized by scientists in the field, we encountered many instances in which a single set would contain multiple gene families, based on functional differences in the gene products. Recognizing that function does not always correspond to simple sequence similarity, the alignment sets derived through automation were renamed in release 7 of Mendel as product families; the term gene family is reserved for sets that share similarity of sequence and function, as determined by working groups. The CPGN endorses, and indeed promotes, the importance of integrating hand curation with automated sorting. *Mendel mirror sites at Cornell and Stanford