Dictyostelium, a single celled eukaryote, has been an important model organism, particularly for studying cell motility, chemotaxis, cell signaling and a variety of other fundamental biological processes. The genome is currently being sequenced by an international consortium including the National Institutes of Health, the European Community, the Sanger Center, and the German National Science Foundation. The genome sequence is scheduled for completion in early 2002. In addition, a Japanese cDNA sequencing effort has identified and sequenced almost 8000 cDNAs. Since Dictyostelium can be easily mutated it also provides an excellent system for functional genomics studies. The value of accumulated gene sequence data, existing mutational studies, functional genomics and other biological studies using Dictyostelium would be greatly enhanced by developing and deploying a model organism database and internet portal for Dictyostelium bioinformatics. Such a resource will also facilitate the use of Dictyostelium by investigators from other fields who wish to take advantage of the experimental benefits of this model system. For the past seven years we have voluntarily operated a web presence for Dictyostelium. This resource includes a database of investigators who use Dictyostelium, links to most laboratories that use Dictyostelium, a database of the Dictyostelium literature, links to all of the genome and cDNA sequencing projects, a newsletter providing summaries of papers accepted for publication prior to their appearance in print, and a collection of methods for the use of Dictyostelium. In this application we propose to greatly expand this online resource by producing and deploying a model organism database based on the yeast database, SGD. This database will use robust commercial database technology and wherever possible data structures and tools developed by SGD, FlyBase, WormBase and other model organism databases. We will utilize the common vocabulary being developed by the Gene Ontology consortium. The database will be accessible to the scientific community and public via the internet. Once established, this resource will provide ongoing curation and annotation for biologically significant data derived from studies using Dictyostelium.
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