In 1994, the The International Society for Plant Molecular Biology's Commission on Plant Gene Nomenclature (CPGN) opened a Registry of Sequenced Plant Genes to serve as an international clearing house for reviewing and assigning gene designations for sequenced plant genes. The nomenclature developed by the CPGN is based on the function of gene products and is common across the plant kingdom. The project has been supported with funds from the USDA and from the European Commission which underwrites the operations of the CPGN in Europe, including a Registry Office in Norwich, UK. The "Mendel" database implemented in the ACEDB database management system is currently accessible over the WWW at: http://probe.nalusda.gov:8300/. In this project, the International Society for Plant Molecular Biology through the CPGN will continue to provide standardized common designations for sequenced plant genes and to re-evaluate the technology support infrastructure for the project. Advisory committees of scientific users and of bioinformaticians will undertake a needs analysis, the production of a data model and design planning for the project in order to increase the level of automation and efficiency of data acquisition and verification. The current system of collecting data in a flat file system will be examined and re-implemented based on the recommendations of the technical and scientific advisory committees. The specific objectives of the project are to: 1) Expand the system of working groups to include all shared categories of plant genes plus certain categories of special scientific, industrial, or pharmaceutical importance, 2) Develop plant-wide designations for 4,000 plant-wide families of genes by the end od 1999. These designations will correspond to 90 percent of all isolated plant genes and for most genes expected on the basis of known proteins and metabolic pathways, 3) Re-design Mendel from its present system of linked flat files to a single database on the A CEDB platform (http://probe.nalusda.gov:8000/acedocs), 4) Organize a system for reciprocal updates of Mendel between the American and European registry offices of the CPGN and 5) Organize an on-line, real-time system of communication with EMBL/GenBank.
