A publicly-accessible Cryptococcus genome database: annotation of the Cryptococcu

University Of California Riverside, Riverside CA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In this project we will provide a manual curation of the literature and gene function for the genomes of the human pathogenic fungus Cryptococcus neoformans and C. gattii. The summary of gene function from published literature, linked it to the genome annotation is a significant result, as it will enable more comprehensive understanding of the biology of the organism as a whole. While genome sequencing of multiple species and years of genetic experiments with Cryptococcus have provided a rich understanding of gene pathways for growth, development, and pathogenesis, the crystallization of this information into curated functions for most genes is lacking. C. neoformans is an effective model genetic system for fungal biology of Basidiomycetes and for investigating mechanisms of pathogenesis so this resource will have importance to a broad collection of researchers. Here we will generate a resource for the community of gene function annotations and linking genes to published literature made freely available through FungiDB, a web-based database with powerful tools for data querying. The two goals of this project are to create a high quality, manual-curated annotation of the function of Cryptococcus genes from the published literature and to make this information easy to search through a website that is connected to sequence information and comparative genomics tools. 1. Literature curation will be performed by an expert curator to associate functions and mutant phenotypes to genes in the 5 sequenced Cryptococcus genomes. Capturing information from published manuscripts will provide clear summary of findings from experiments and associate these functions and cellular roles with specific genes. Similar resources for Saccharomyces and Aspergillus have become essential tools for those research communities. 2. Provide a publically available and searchable website to the curated annotation. The captured knowledge from the manual curation will be deposited into FungiDB to provide researchers with access to data mining and search tools to identify patterns in their data from Cryptococcus genomes. FungiDB provides access to functional or comparative genomics data which will be combined with this new gene annotation information.