A Resource Center for Tetrahymena Thermophila

Curation and Informatics: Summary / Abstract This proposal seeks continued funding for the Tetrahymena Stock Center to enable maintenance of the Tetrahymena Stock Center and Tetrahymena Genome Database (TGD) together to create a comprehensive resource providing both physical samples (e.g. cell line) and curated information, enabling a wide range of scientific investigations. In this renewal application, we will implement several new innovations related to resource curation to facilitate biological and biomedical research. A major goal of this work is to increase the findability of physical resources by improving the interconnectivity between the two components of this resource. We will also focus on evaluation of our operations and practices, information that we will review with our external advisory committee, to ensure that we are most efficiently serving our research community. The overall aims of our curation activities are to 1) improve curation of stocks by assigning RRID designations to new acquisitions and use bioinformatics to link genes associated with specific stocks to human disease- associated genes. In addition, we will post accurate DNA sequences of plasmid DNA resources. The goal is to increase findability and usability of these physical resources; 2) increase the interoperability of genomic data at TGD by updating the current gene annotations based on recent curation, expanding the quality and quantity of Gene Ontology (GO) annotations, and adding links to gene annotations at common bioinformatics data and protein feature resources; 3) consolidate and display gene expression data sets. We will develop guidelines that will help researchers format and submit their expression data files to TGD so that they can be placed in datahubs and displayed on the Tetrahymena genome browser or the WashU epigenome browser; 4) increase the capacity of web portals to gather assessment data. Improvements to the Stock Center website are planned that will allow us to monitor usage, improve transparency in the stock ordering process, and capture user information and thereby allow the Stock Center to better serve the research community. By improving these genome resources and assisting researchers with analysis pipelines, the Stock Center can provide the highest level of support to the research community.