Echinobase (www.echinobase.org) is a model organism knowledgebase serving as a resource for the community that studies echinoderms, a phylum of marine invertebrates that includes sea urchins and sea stars.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFXenbase (https://www.xenbase.org/), the Xenopus model organism knowledgebase, is a web-accessible resource that integrates the diverse genomic and biological data from research on the laboratory frogs Xenopus laevis and Xenopus tropicalis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPronephric kidneys have a single large nephron that provides essential osmoregulation in amphibians and fish until the adult kidney forms. As mammalian kidneys evolved from the simple pronephric kidneys of the early vertebrates, understanding the structure and function of pronephroi gives insight into the blueprints underlying all nephrons. The article in this issue by Corkins et al.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNormal tables of development are essential for studies of embryogenesis, serving as an important resource for model organisms, including the frog Xenopus laevis. Xenopus has long been used to study developmental and cell biology, and is an increasingly important model for human birth defects and disease, genomics, proteomics and toxicology. Scientists utilize Nieuwkoop and Faber's classic 'Normal Table of Xenopus laevis (Daudin)' and accompanying illustrations to enable experimental reproducibility and reuse the illustrations in new publications and teaching.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this report we describe the embryogenesis of the bay pipefish, Syngnathus leptorhynchus, and the organogenesis of its aglomerular kidney. Early development was analyzed via a series of montages and images documenting embryos collected from the brood pouches of pregnant males. Despite differences in terminal morphology between pipefish and common teleost models such as medaka and zebrafish, the embryogenesis of these highly advanced fishes is generally similar to that of other fishes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Ontologies of precisely defined, controlled vocabularies are essential to curate the results of biological experiments such that the data are machine searchable, can be computationally analyzed, and are interoperable across the biomedical research continuum. There is also an increasing need for methods to interrelate phenotypic data easily and accurately from experiments in animal models with human development and disease.
Results: Here we present the Xenopus phenotype ontology (XPO) to annotate phenotypic data from experiments in Xenopus, one of the major vertebrate model organisms used to study gene function in development and disease.
Echinobase (www.echinobase.org) is a third generation web resource supporting genomic research on echinoderms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA keyword-based search of comprehensive databases such as PubMed may return irrelevant papers, especially if the keywords are used in multiple fields of study. In such cases, domain experts (curators) need to verify the results and remove the irrelevant articles. Automating this filtering process will save time, but it has to be done well enough to ensure few relevant papers are rejected and few irrelevant papers are accepted.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEchinobase (https://echinobase.org) is a central online platform that generates, manages and hosts genomic data relevant to echinoderm research. While the resource primarily serves the echinoderm research community, the recent release of an excellent quality genome for the frequently studied purple sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus genome, v5.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFXenbase (www.xenbase.org) is a knowledge base for researchers and biomedical scientists that employ the amphibian Xenopus as a model organism in biomedical research to gain a deeper understanding of developmental and disease processes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRhythms of various periodicities drive cyclical processes in organisms ranging from single cells to the largest mammals on earth, and on scales from cellular physiology to global migrations. The molecular mechanisms that generate circadian behaviours in model organisms have been well studied, but longer phase cycles and interactions between cycles with different periodicities remain poorly understood. Broadcast spawning corals are one of the best examples of an organism integrating inputs from multiple environmental parameters, including seasonal temperature, the lunar phase and hour of the day, to calibrate their annual reproductive event.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAt a fundamental level most genes, signaling pathways, biological functions and organ systems are highly conserved between man and all vertebrate species. Leveraging this conservation, researchers are increasingly using the experimental advantages of the amphibian to model human disease. The online resource, Xenbase, enables human disease modeling by curating the literature published in PubMed and integrating these data with orthologous human genes, anatomy, and more recently with links to the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man resource (OMIM) and the Human Disease Ontology (DO).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEvol Bioinform Online
July 2018
With the advent of whole transcriptome and genome analysis methods, classifying samples containing multiple origins has become a significant task. Nucleotide sequences can be allocated to a genome or transcriptome by aligning sequences to multiple target sequence sets, but this approach requires extensive computational resources and also depends on target sequence sets lacking contaminants, which is often not the case. Here, we demonstrate that raw sequences can be rapidly sorted into groups, in practice corresponding to genera, by exploiting differences in nucleotide GC content.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStony corals from the genus Acropora are widely distributed, important reef-builders and have become increasingly utilized for investigating links between genetics and spawning behaviour. We assembled and annotated a composite transcriptome from Acropora gemmifera using Illumina HiSeq2500 analysis of two libraries from different lunar and solar phases to identify genes that have potential functional roles in reproductive-related traits. A total of 31.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFXenbase is the Xenopus model organism database ( www.xenbase.org ), a web-accessible resource that integrates the diverse genomic and biological data for Xenopus research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFXenbase (www.xenbase.org) is an online resource for researchers utilizing Xenopus laevis and Xenopus tropicalis, and for biomedical scientists seeking access to data generated with these model systems.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOn one night per year, at a specific point in the lunar cycle, one of the most extraordinary reproductive events on the planet unfolds as hundreds of millions of broadcast spawning corals release their trillions of gametes into the waters of the tropical seas. Each species spawns on a specific night within the lunar cycle, typically from full moon to third quarter moon, and in a specific time window after sunset. This accuracy is essential to achieve efficient fertilization in the vastness of the oceans.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo explore the origins and consequences of tetraploidy in the African clawed frog, we sequenced the Xenopus laevis genome and compared it to the related diploid X. tropicalis genome. We characterize the allotetraploid origin of X.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany broadcast spawning corals in multiple reef regions release their gametes with incredible temporal precision just once per year, using the lunar cycle to set the night of spawning. Moonlight, rather than tides or other lunar-regulated processes, is thought to be the proximate factor responsible for linking the night of spawning to the phase of the Moon. We compared patterns of gene expression among colonies of the broadcast spawning coral Acropora millepora at different phases of the lunar cycle, and when they were maintained under one of three experimentally simulated lunar lighting treatments: i) lunar lighting conditions matching those on the reef, or lunar patterns mimicking either ii) constant full Moon conditions, or iii) constant new Moon conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe two species of Xenopus most commonly used in biomedical research are the diploid Xenopus (Silurana) tropicalis and the tetraploid Xenopus laevis. The X. tropicalis genome sequence has been available since 2010 and this year the X.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFXenbase, the Xenopus model organism database (www.xenbase.org), is a cloud-based, web-accessible resource that integrates the diverse genomic and biological data from Xenopus research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCytogenet Genome Res
December 2015
At the heart of databases is a data model referred to as a schema. Relational databases store information in tables, and the schema defines the tables and provides a map of relationships that show how the different table/data types relate to one another. In Xenbase, we were tasked to represent genomic, molecular, and biological data of both a diploid and tetraploid Xenopus species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across many key fields in biology, including genomics, systems biology, development, medicine, evolution, ecology, and systematics. Here we survey the current phenomics landscape, including data resources and handling, and the progress that has been made to accurately capture relevant data descriptions for phenotypes.
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