The Candida Genome Database (CGD) is considered THE resource for comprehensive information about the human fungal pathogen Candida albicans and related Candida species, and is widely used by the Candida research community, who relies upon CGD in their everyday work. C. albicans is the third or fourth most common nosocomial bloodstream isolate; mortality rates are high (35% or greater) and treatment is costly. It is thus vital that there is a comprehensive and up-to-date resource for researchers investigating the biology and pathogenesis of C. albicans, as such a resource accelerates their research. The central challenge for any community database, in this era of high throughput technologies becoming widely available, is to turn the flood of data into knowledge, which the community can access, use and build upon. We firmly believe that a research community is best served by collection of all relevant data in a single location, followed by manual, expert curation of those data, coupled with tools to allow users to search and navigate the data in an intuitive fashion. Most of the data available in CGD are not available from any other site, and no other site performs curation of the C. albicans literature. We re-use software wherever possible, writing our own only when necessary. This philosophy has served us well, in that we have built CGD into an indispensible resource with modest staff, and we will continue to apply this model going forward. In this renewal for CGD we propose to build on our previous successes. We will expand the large-scale data types stored at CGD, curate the datasets, and provide new tools to analyze and visualize these data. We will also use these high-throughput data to improve the sequences and primary annotations for Candida genomes - reference genomes provide the fundamental platform upon which a community's research builds, and it is vital that they be correct and correctly annotated. We will perform real-time curation of the experimental literature, capturing gene names, mutant phenotypes, Gene Ontology Terms, etc., from papers as they are published, so that at a glance a bench biologist can find the salient, up-to-date information about any gene to which their research leads them. Finally, we will provide support to the Candida scientific community, ensuring that we are continuing to serve their needs as the indispensible resource that we have become. Together, successful completion of these aims will support and accelerate research into fungal pathogenesis, and thus have a positive impact on human health.
C. albicans has become the third or fourth most common nosocomial bloodstream isolate; mortality rates are high (35% or greater) and treatment is costly. While antifungal compounds exist, these drugs are often of limited use because of their toxicity and side effects, and due to the emergence of antifungal resistance in the clinical setting. It is vital that C. albicans research continue as rapidly as possible - successful advance of this project, to provide a curated and comprehensive Candida albicans database, will continue to accelerate Candida research, and in doing so will aid in the fight against these fungal infections, significantly positively impacting human health.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 17 publications
