Candida Genome Database

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract The Candida Genome Database (CGD) is considered THE resource for comprehensive information about the human fungal pathogen Candida albicans and related Candida species, and is widely used by the Candida research community, who rely upon CGD in their everyday work. C. albicans is the third or fourth most common nosocomial bloodstream isolate; mortality rates are high (35% or greater) and treatment is costly. It is thus vital that there is a comprehensive and up-to-date resource for researchers investigating the biology and pathogenesis of C. albicans and related species, as such a resource accelerates their research. The central challenge for any community database is to turn data into knowledge, which the community can access, use and build upon. This is especially important in this era of high throughput technologies, which produce a flood of such data. A research community is clearly best served by the collection of all relevant data in a single location, followed by manual, expert curation of those data, coupled with tools to allow users to search and navigate the data in an intuitive fashion. Most of the data available in CGD are not available from any other site, and no other site performs curation of the C. albicans literature. We re-use software wherever possible, writing our own only when necessary. This philosophy has served us well, in that we have built CGD into an indispensable resource with modest staff, and we will continue to apply this model going forward. In this renewal for CGD we propose to build on our previous successes. We will use high-throughput data to improve the sequences and primary annotations for Candida genomes—reference genomes provide the fundamental platform upon which a community’s research builds, and it is vital that they be accurate and correctly and comprehensively annotated. We will perform real-time curation of the experimental literature, capturing gene names, mutant phenotypes, Gene Ontology Terms, etc., from papers as they are published, allowing a bench biologist to, at a glance, find the salient, up-to-date information about any gene to which their research leads them. We will modernize CGD— the code upon which it is built was written over a quarter of a century ago—providing both additional functionality as well as improved and more responsive navigation. Finally, we will provide support to the Candida scientific community, ensuring that we are continuing to serve their needs as the indispensable resource that we have become. Together, successful completion of these aims will support and accelerate research into fungal pathogenesis, and thus have a positive impact on human health.