Database

Fourmidable: a database for ant genomics

Yannick Wurm¹ , Paolo Uva² , Frédéric Ricci¹ , John Wang¹ , Stephanie Jemielity³ , Christian Iseli^4,5 , Laurent Falquet⁵ and Laurent Keller¹

¹Department of Ecology and Evolution, Biophore, University of Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

²Istituto di Ricerche di Biologia Molecolare, Merck Research Laboratories, 00040 Pomezia, Rome, Italy

³Institut for Infectious Diseases, University of Bern, CH-3010 Bern, Switzerland

⁴Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

⁵Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

author email corresponding author email

BMC Genomics 2009, 10:5doi:10.1186/1471-2164-10-5

Published:	6 January 2009

Abstract

Background

Fourmidable is an infrastructure to curate and share the emerging genetic, molecular, and functional genomic data and protocols for ants.

Description

The Fourmidable assembly pipeline groups nucleotide sequences into clusters before independently assembling each cluster. Subsequently, assembled sequences are annotated via Interproscan and BLAST against general and insect-specific databases. Gene-specific information can be retrieved using gene identifiers, searching for similar sequences or browsing through inferred Gene Ontology annotations. The database will readily scale as ultra-high throughput sequence data and sequences from additional species become available.

Conclusion

Fourmidable currently houses EST data from two ant species and microarray gene expression data for one of these. Fourmidable is publicly available at http://fourmidable.unil.ch webcite