Xenbase: a Xenopus Model Organism Knowledgebase

Component: OVERALL PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Xenbase is the Xenopus Model Organism Knowledgebase (MOK), an online resource that integrates all genomic and biological data from Xenopus research. Our mission is to accelerate the translation of Xenopus research into knowledge that will improve human health. We aim to empower Xenopus research and enhance the impact of Xenopus data in the broader biomedical community, as animal models, such as Xenopus, are essential for biomedical research and have led to a wealth of discoveries. Xenbase is user-friendly, allowing investigators to quickly find and link different data types in ways that would otherwise be difficult, time consuming, or impossible. It provides high quality curation, data integration, and bioinformatics tools to link Xenopus data to humans and other model organisms, NCBI, UniProt, Ensembl and other resources. In this post genomic era, with thousands of scientific publications annually, and the exponential growth of “omic” datasets, Xenbase is essential to translate the enormous amount of data generated from research using Xenopus into meaningful connected data. Xenbase, thus, plays an essential role in maximizing NIH’s >$120 million annual investment in Xenopus research. Xenbase is an essential resource for hundreds of labs around the world. There is a clear need to continue curating Xenopus data, to develop new tools to keep up with technological advances, and link Xenopus data to human biology in novel and insightful ways. Many of the letters of support (more than 110) state that labs could not function without Xenbase, and renewed funding for Xenbase was identified as the top priority in the 2020 Xenopus research community white paper.