Genomic Database for the Flowering Plant Arabidopsis thaliana

小花植物拟南芥属植物已成为植物生物学的模式系统。其独特的特性使其可以应用于广泛的研究问题，包括植物生理学，器官发育的分子遗传学研究，以及植物与病原体的相互作用。随着种质资源和DNA资源中心、遗传和物理图谱及其技术、表达序列标签和基因组测序项目的国际化发展，拟南芥在植物生物学中的重要性日益增加。此外，由于开花植物的进化是最近的，在拟南芥中确定一个基因的特征通常会简化在另一个开花植物中分离相应基因的过程。该项目的主要任务是提供一个专门的电子数据库，供科学界用来收集、交叉参考、组织、分发和维护科学数据及其结果。近期目标是利用用户社区的投入创建一个初始原型数据库，并在过渡期间维护现有的公共拟南芥数据库AAtDB。预计在该奖项下开发的原型将成为下一代拟南芥数据库的基础，在可预见的未来将满足研究人员的需求。

The small flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana, a member of the mustard family, has become the model system for plant biology. Its unique features allow it to be applied to a wide variety of research problems, including plant physiology, the molecular genetic study of organ development, and plant-pathogen interactions. The importance of Arabidopsis to plant biology is increasing with the international development of germplasm and DNA stock resource centers, genetic and physical maps and their techniques, plus expressed sequence tag and genomic sequencing projects. Furthermore, because flowering plants evolved recently, characterizing a gene in Arabidopsis often simplifies the isolation of a corresponding gene in another flowering plant. The primary mission of this project is to provide a specialized electronic database that can be used by the scientific community to collect, cross-reference, organize, distribute and maintain the scientific data and their results. The immediate goals are to create an initial prototype database with input from the user community, and to maintain the existing public Arabidopsis database, AAtDB, in the interim. It is expected that the prototype developed under this award will become a basis for the next generation Arabidopsis database that will meet the needs of the researchers for the foreseeable future.