Poster: Bioinformatics

Abs # 909: Data Integration and Mining for Medicago Genomics

Presenter:	Wang, Liangjiang , lwang@noble.org
Authors	Wang, Liangjiang  (A)   Zhang, Yuanji  (A)   Yang, Jian  (A)
Affiliations:	(A): The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation

A large collection of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) have been generated for the model legume Medicago truncatula. With the progress of genome sequencing, M. truncatula can serve as an excellent model organism for functional and structural genomics of plant-microbe interactions, natural product biosynthetic pathways and stress responses. However, the sequence and related information is distributed and not organized in an optimal way for genomic studies. We developed computational methods to transform, clean and load the sequence data into a local warehouse, and to integrate the data with other information from major public databases (e.g., GenBank, Pfam and PDB). The integrated database system allows us to perform genome-wide search for legume-specific sequences and transcriptional factors that may be involved in legume-specific processes. We will present results from these studies, and discuss the possibility of using these genes as targets for functional and/or structural genomics in M. truncatula. The database and related bioinformatic tools are available at http://bioinfo.noble.org.