Uniform standards for genome databases in forest and fruit trees

TreeGenes and tree fruit Genome Database Resources serve the international forestry and fruit tree genomics research communities, respectively. These databases hold similar sequence data and provide resources for the submission and recovery of this information in order to enable comparative genomics research. Large-scale genotype and phenotype projects have recently spawned the development of independent tools and interfaces within these repositories to deliver information to both geneticists and breeders. The increase in next generation sequencing projects has increased the amount of data as well as the scale of analysis that can be performed. These two repositories are now working towards a similar goal of archiving the diverse, independent data sets generated from genotype/phenotype experiments. This is achieved through focused development on data input standards (templates), pipelines for the storage and automated curation, and consistent annotation efforts through the application of widely accepted ontologies to improve the extraction and exchange of the data for comparative analysis. Efforts towards standardization are not limited to genotype/phenotype experiments but are also being applied to other data types to improve gene prediction and annotation for de novo sequencing projects. The resources developed towards these goals represent the first large-scale coordinated effort in plant databases to add informatics value to diverse genotype/phenotype experiments.