COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: ABI Innovation: A novel database and ontology for evolutionary analyses of mammalian feeding physiology

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This award was made to transform the current prototype of the Feeding Experiments End-user Database (FEED) into a data-rich, publicly-available source of physiological data on feeding in mammals that incorporates a novel ontology module. An important innovation is the development of five non-overlapping ontologies related to feeding behavior, function, and structure that will provide the constrained definitions of terms necessary to permit computational comparisons in analyses of phenotypic diversity. Ontology construction begins with an ontology workshop. Ontology and database development will be driven by a set of six use cases that comprise synthetic, phylogenetically-informed analyses aimed at understanding the integrated roles of physiology and morphology during a variety of feeding behaviors in mammals. The research will to initiate new collaborations involving FEED as a primary data source by engaging three scientific communities (reptile feeding physiologists, bioengineers, and developmental biologists) in a series of interdisciplinary use case development workshops. During the workshops, the project team will design and commence work on new use cases that will guide efforts to extend the infrastructure of FEED and permit synthetic studies that cut across traditional knowledge domains. This project is innovative because it generates a proof-of-concept database to facilitate understanding of the complexity and connectivity between behaviors, physiological mechanisms, and structures involved in mammalian feeding across multiple scales of organization, and because it includes work to insure that FEED is a tool that is extensible to other scientific communities.Broader impacts include development and public release of novel bioinformatic research infrastructure for physiology, a field that has traditionally been on the periphery of bioinformatics. This project promotes interdisciplinary collaborations among scientists across four knowledge domains. Training of undergraduate and graduate students in research on morphological and physiological analysis as well as database and ontology construction is an important focus. FEED will also be utilized as a teaching tool in bioinformatics courses aimed at undergraduate and graduate education in informatics. Dissemination of project outcomes and public access to the FEED database will be available at www.feedexp.org.