CottonGen: Developing an Integrated Genomics, Genetics and Breeding Database for Cotton Research

A new cotton community database (CottonGen, htpp://www.cottongen.org) is being developed to further enable cotton genomics, genetics and breeding research.  CottonGen will be built using the open-source Tripal database infrastructure developed for the genome databases hosted at Washington State University (www.bioinfo.wsu.edu).  CottonGen will initially consolidate the data from CottonDB and the Cotton Marker Database (CMD), which includes sequences, genetic and physical maps, genotypic and phenotypic markers and polymorphisms, QTLs, pathogens, germplasm collections and trait evaluations, pedigrees,  and relevant bibliographic citations.  CottonGen will be expanded to include annotated transcriptome, genome sequence, marker-trait-locus and breeding data, as well as enhanced tools for easy querying and visualizing research data.  Examples of the functionality being developed for CottonGen by reference to examples from our existing Tripal databases will be presented.