BeetleBase: the model organism database for Tribolium castaneum

Paper by Liangjiang Wang, Suzhi Wang, Yonghua Li, Martin S. R. Paradesi and Susan J. Brown. D476–D479 Nucleic Acids Research, 2007, Vol. 35, Database issue.

Abstract

BeetleBase (http://www.bioinformatics.ksu.edu/ BeetleBase/) is an integrated resource for the Tribolium research community. The red flour beetle (Tribolium castaneum) is an important model organism for genetics, developmental biology, toxicology and comparative genomics, the genome of which has recently been sequenced. BeetleBase is constructed to integrate the genomic sequence data with information about genes, mutants, genetic markers, expressed sequence tags and publications. BeetleBase uses the Chado data model and software components developed by the Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD) project. This strategy not only reduces the time required to develop the database query tools but also makes the data structure of BeetleBase compatible with that of other model organism databases. BeetleBase will be useful to the Tribolium research community for genome annotation as well as comparative genomics.