Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

Phenotypes are an important subject of biomedical research for which many repositories have already been created. Most of these databases are either dedicated to a single species or to a single disease of interest. With the advent of technologies to generate phenotypes in a high-throughput manner, not only is the volume of phenotype data growing fast but also the need to organize these data in more useful ways. We have created PhenomicDB (freely available at http://www.phenomicdb.de), a multi-species genotype/phenotype database, which shows phenotypes associated with their corresponding genes and grouped by gene orthologies across a variety of species. We have enhanced PhenomicDB recently by additionally incorporating quantitative and descriptive RNA interference (RNAi) screening data, by enabling the usage of phenotype ontology terms and by providing information on assays and cell lines. We envision that integration of classical phenotypes with high-throughput data will bring new momentum and insights to our understanding. Modern analysis tools under development may help exploiting this wealth of information to transform it into knowledge and, eventually, into novel therapeutic approaches.

We have created PhenomicDB, a multi-species genotype/phenotype database by merging public genotype/phenotype data from a wide range of model organisms and Homo sapiens. Until now these data were available in distinct organism-specific databases (e.g. WormBase, OMIM, FlyBase and MGI). We compiled this wealth of data into a single integrated resource by coarse-grained semantic mapping of the phenotypic data fields, by including common gene indices (NCBI Gene), and by the use of associated orthology relationships. With its use-case-oriented user interface, PhenomicDB allows scientists to compare and browse known phenotypes for a given gene or a set of genes from different organisms simultaneously. PhenomicDB has been implemented at Schering AG as described below. A PhenomicDB implementation differing in some technical details has been set up for the public at Metalife AG http://www.phenomicDB.de database model, semantic mapping table.