Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access published online on November 3, 2007
Nucleic Acids Research, doi:10.1093/nar/gkm941
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Database Issue |
Upgrades to StellaBase facilitate medical and genetic studies on the starlet sea anemone, Nematostella vectensis
Department of Biology, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +1 617 353 6984; Fax: +1 617 353 6340; Email: jrf3{at}bu.edu
Received September 18, 2007. Revised October 9, 2007. Accepted October 11, 2007.
The starlet sea anemone, Nematostella vectensis, is a basal metazoan organism that has recently emerged as an important model system in developmental biology and evolutionary genomics. StellaBase, the Nematostella Genomics Database (http://stellabase.org), was developed in 2005 as a resource to support the Nematostella research community. Recently, it has become apparent that Nematostella may be a particularly useful system for studying (i) microevolutionary variation in natural populations, and (ii) the functional evolution of human disease genes. We have developed two new databases that will foster such studies: StellaBase Disease (http://stellabase.org/disease) is a relational database that houses 155 904 invertebrate homologous isoforms of human disease genes from four leading genomic model systems (fly, worm, yeast and Nematostella), including 14 874 predicted genes from the sea anemone itself. StellaBase SNP (http://stellabase.org/SNP) is a relational database that describes the location and underlying type of mutation for 20 063 single nucleotide polymorphisms.