Subject: DataBases

From: [email-masked] (Leland Ellis)
Date: 4 Sep 93 15:34:13 GMT

In Articles #56 and 57, Nathan Wilson details a very interesting effort
towards developing a computer database for fungal taxonomy.  I would
certainly like to have a look at this, and hope that the Unix port is
forthcoming.

Somewhat related to this, my co-moderators of this Newsgroup (Tom Adams
[Dept. of Biology, Texas A&M University, College Station] and Greg
May [Dept. of Cell Biology, Baylor CoM, Houston]) and I are developing
a database initially for Aspergillus nidulans, which we hope will
stimulate interest in comparable efforts for other filamentous fungi.
Initially, we are using the ACeDB engine developed by Durbin and
Thierry-Mieg for the C. elegans Genome Project (see bionet.software.
acedb Newsgroup).  This db, termed AAnDB (i.e., an Aspergillus nidulans
database), is in the early stages of development, but already includes
several data types of general use, as well as for use by molecular
biologists interested in genome mapping and Genome Informatics:
strains, references, colleagues, clones, cosmid grids, etc.  In the
spirit of the ACeDB effort, this db is of course in the public domain,
and we want to encourage all interested investigators to contribute
information to the db, and then to use it upon release.  Our plan at
present is to have a demonstration of AAnDB at Plant Genome II, where
Mike Cherry (Stanford Univ. and AAtDB) is organizing a Workshop that
will include presentations and demos of a variety of dbs, esp. from
the Plant Genome DB effort of the USDA.  By next Summer (1994), we plan
to have a poster/demo at the Fungal Gordon Conf., and hope that by then
the db is ready for distribution.  We will do this by anonymous ftp, as
other ACeDBs have done.

Secondly, we are using NCSA's Mosaic and the World-Wide Web as an
Informatics front-end to this project, as well as more generally to
the activities of the W.M. Keck Center for Genome Informatics.  Our
home page can be accessed at this URL:

http://keck.tamu.edu/ibt.html

Leland Ellis, Ph.D.
Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics
Director, W.M. Keck Center for Genome Informatics
Institute of Biosciences and Technology
Texas A&M University
2121 Holcombe
Houston, Texas  77030
tel: (713) 677-7607
fax: (713) 677-7963
email: [email-masked]