"Frontmatter". In: Plant Genomics and Proteomics

D
ATABASES AND
I
NFORMATICS
The high-throughput methodologies that have been developed for both
DNA and proteomics have highlighted the need for sophisticated infor-
matics to deal with the data. Additionally, it is also essential to define the
appropriate structures for the databases that house all this information so
that the data can be accessible both immediately and in an archival form. 
D
ATABASES
The creation of biological databases represents a fundamental change in the
way biological information is disseminated. Future advances in biology will
D
ATA B A S E S A N D
I
N F O R M AT I C S
3 9

---

4 0
2. T
H E
B
A S I C
T
O O L B O X
— A
C Q U I R I N G
F
U N C T I O N A L
G
E N O M I C
D
ATA
size
pH
Mass Spectrometry
Determine mass
or
Determine amino
acid sequence
Compare with
existing databases
to find matches and
identify proteins
Extract proteins
from the gel. Split
into peptiode
fragments
Low abundance high
Sample 1
Sample 2
FIGURE 2.7.
Pr
oteomics experimental flow
. The isolation of pr
oteins followed by their separation by 2-D
gel electr
ophor
esis. The patterns of pr
oteins ar
e compar
ed, and those of inter
est ar
e excised, fragmented, and
separated by mass spectr
ometry
. The amino acid composition or sequence is determined (depending on 
the particular MS technology applied), and the databases ar
e sear
ched to identify the pr
otein. The actual
amino acid sequence is important for those species for which ther
e is little genomic or cDNA
sequence. 
Pr
otein abundance fr
om sample 1; 
pr
otein abundance fr
om sample 2.

---

depend, in large part, on the improvement of critical databases. However,
organism-specific researchers want to generate and use data locally, 
annotate it as needed, and answer very specific questions driven by 
physical experimentation, even though these experimental data and findings
often are shared with the global community. This larger group of researchers,
namely the global community, requires access to large amounts of data 
to address questions that might be of limited interest to its original pro-
ducers. Furthermore, the tools and data formats applicable to this high-level
sharing may be very different from those applied in the context of the orig-
inal data production. The underlying challenge, therefore, is to integrate
diverse data and data types in order to provide a more complete and con-
sistent view of the information contained therein and to provide the means
to increase the utility of these resources as the quantity of data increases in
the future. 
Currently, however, the distributed data resources of biology, and in par-
ticular of plant genomics, share a number of characteristics that have made
the actual interrogation and analysis problematic. In many instances the data
are in flat file structures and there is no separate schema for the metadata or
such a schema is not available. The data are addressed through varying call-
based interfaces, rather than through a declarative query language. This dis-
allows the use of agents and requires human-computer interactions. Indeed,
the data collections that result from the genomics revolution represent a need
to change the way in which biological data are disseminated. 
All databases should allow the broadest access possible to accommodate
these altered data usages. Therefore, a standard format must be developed
to facilitate this access. Included in the consideration of such formats would
be that the associated metadata must also be accessible to enable queries by
machine agents as well as individuals. Wherever possible, the development
and use of organism- and/or database-independent software should be
encouraged. This will not diminish the importance of organism-dependent
repositories but will enable the data to be used more widely and will increase
their importance.
The essential information associated with these data repositories, or par-
ticular entries within the databases, should also be reported. For example, a
list of possible information associated with comparative genetic mapping in
plants could include the raw segregation data for the individual mapping
populations, explicit criteria that were used to determine whether two
markers represent orthologous loci, and the sequences of all DNA-based
markers as GenBank files. Trace files for sequence-based polymorphisms
should be archived by mapping laboratories for future access, and the under-
lying information used to construct the physical maps (e.g., FPC fingerprints,
BAC end sequences, BAC hybridization) could be made publicly available
in a project database. The structure of the databases and the information 
contained therein must be supported by appropriate documentation and
D
ATA B A S E S A N D
I
N F O R M AT I C S
4 1

---

standard operating procedures for both experimentation and analysis. A
set of criteria somewhat like those developed for microarrays, but perhaps
in the form of the minimal information associated with a functional
genomics experiment (MIAFGE) would go some way to solving this
problem. A start on generating such metrics has been made by the Plant
Genome Research Program (http://plantgenome.sdsc.edu/Awardees
Meeting/Bioinformatics_and_Databases/).
Given a collective effort, the bioinformatics landscape could be trans-
formed from a small number of insular database projects to a large number
of open, interoperable data services that together would form the fabric of a
new biological data infrastructure. This transformation would require a
change of emphasis, reducing the efforts on species-specific databases and
redeploying them to the development of biological data service infrastruc-
ture from which deliverables would be portable, general-purpose software
and standards that would be made freely available to the academic com-
munity as well as industry. Databases such as ZMDB and Gramene that are
developing both the tools and open structures to allow the broadest access
are examples of these efforts. 
I
NFORMATICS
T
OOLS
A range of informatics tools is needed to analyze this massive generation of
data. For nucleic acids, these tools range from those dealing with sequence
quality and assembly to search engines for comparing sequences and also
include programs that can be used to annotate DNA sequences that are
trained to identify genes. 
S
EQUENCE
Q
UALITY
Generally the sequence quality is checked by the length of the reads and
quality score assignment. Phred reads DNA sequencer trace data, calls bases,
assigns quality values to the bases, and writes the base calls and quality
values to output files (Ewing et al., 1998). These files can be in any one of
three formats: FASTA, PHD or the SCF. Quality values for the bases are
written to both FASTA and PHD format files. These files can be used by the
Phrap sequence assembly program to increase the accuracy of the assembled
sequence.
Phrap is a leading program for DNA sequence assembly. Phrap is used
to locate overlapping regions within individual sequences and assemble
them into longer contiguous sequences (contigs). Phrap is most commonly
used for assembling data from shotgun sequencing but can also be used for
EST clustering, genotyping, and identifying sequence polymorphisms.
Phrap uses Phred’s quality scores to determine a highly accurate consensus
4 2
2. T
H E
B
A S I C
T
O O L B O X
— A
C Q U I R I N G
F
U N C T I O N A L
G
E N O M I C
D
ATA

---

sequence by examining all the individual sequences at a given position. This
approach is especially important in regions of low coverage or regions of
systematic errors. The quality of the consensus sequence is also estimated
from the quality information of individual sequences. 
A more common program for EST clustering is CLUSTAL W 
(Thompson, 1994). This is a freely available and portable program for mul-
tiple sequence alignment. Because EST projects are essentially one-pass
sequencing of cDNAs it is important to cluster the derived sequences into
contiguous sets that come from the same gene or from members of a gene
family. This will result in a consensus sequence of that transcript. The 
consensus sequence can be used, for example, to design overgo oligos 
for screening related BAC libraries and for designing primers to test 
whether nucleotide polymorphisms within the clustered sequence are the
result of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) or sequencing errors. The
clustered consensus can also be longer than any of the individual ESTs,
thereby extending the length of the known transcribed sequence.
As well as needing to cluster ESTs, shotgun reads of genomic sequences
also must be assembled. The program CAP4 (Huang et al., 2000) utilizes base
quality values, forward-reverse constraints, and automatic clipping of poor-
quality ends based on overlaps to assist in assembly and production of more
accurate contigs. CAP4 generates contigs and consensus sequences that can
be viewed and edited with Paracel’s AssemblyView, the University of 
Washington’s Consed (Gordon et al., 1998), or Staden’s gap4 Contig Editor.
Furthermore, CAP4 also generates valuable information concerning scaf-
folds, that is, what contigs are linked together based on constraints. This
feature is especially important for low-pass sequencing projects to order 
the contigs and for finishing phases by providing information on which 
subclones are necessary to bridge the gaps.
The whole suite of informatics resources and needs are described in
more detail in Chapter 9.