ToxoDB:The Toxoplasma gondii Genome Database

Kissinger, J.C.¹, Gajria, B.², Li, L.², Paulsen, I.T.³, Roos, D.S.²

¹Department of Genetics & Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, Univeristy of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602 USA
²Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA
³The Institute for Genomic Research, Rockville, MD, 20850 USA

Contact jkissing@sas.upenn.edu

Database Description

ToxoDB (http://ToxoDB.org) is a genome resource for Toxoplasma gondii. Several sequencing projects have been completed or are in progress for Toxoplasma; a large EST project (http://genome.wustl.edu/est/ index.php?toxoplasma=1), a BAC clone end- sequencing project (http://www.sanger.ac.uk/ Projects/T_gondii/) and an 8X random shotgun genomic sequencing project (http:// www.tigr.org/tdb/e2k1/tga1/). ToxoDB was designed to provide a central point of access for all available T. gondii data and specifically to provide data mining tools useful for the analysis of unfinished, un-annotated draft sequence during the early phases of the genome project. In later stages, as more and different types of data are available (microarry, proteomic, SNP, QTL) the database will provide an integrated data analysis platform facilitating user-defined queries across the different data types.

Acknowledgements

Financial support for ToxoDB was provided by the National Institutes of Health. We thank the numerous researchers who have collaborated with and contributed data to ToxoDB, and the software and database researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, who contributed greatly to the development and implementation of the software and infrastructure necessary to create organism- specific databases from generic software components. We also wish to thank the scientists, sequencing centers and funding agencies for agreeing to make the data available prior to publication.