The European Xenopus Stock Centre: a bioinformatically integrated molecular and animal resource

欧洲非洲爪蟾资源中心成立于2006年9月。它的功能是为细胞和发育生物学家提供野生型和转基因动物，这些生物学家将青蛙用作脊椎动物发育的模型。这一功能非常重要，因为动物很难从其他国家方便地运输，而且在英国没有此类动物的商业供应商。这一点也很重要，因为将动物安置在一个地点减少了需要在英国各地实验室照顾的动物总数，从而减少了必须向内政部报告的实验中使用的动物数量。该提案要求提供资金，以扩大该中心的目标。特别是，该中心的活动需要牢固地嵌入一个数据库，该数据库被研究青蛙的科学家作为一种资源大量使用（加拿大卡尔加里大学Xenbase）。这需要相当多的数据库处理专业知识来编写程序，以便搜索领域，并描述发育和基因表达的模式。使用与Xenbase相同的系统将确保在资源中心和Xenbase站点之间方便移动，从而利用两个站点的设施。这种将生物学数据整合到计算机数据库中的过程被称为生物信息学。该提案的第二部分扩大了库存中心将携带和分发给英国和世界各地科学家的材料范围。发育生物学是一门旨在了解复杂生物如何从单个受精卵中产生的科学。这通常涉及研究基因在发育中的胚胎中如何、何时、何地表达，以及如果这些基因错误表达会发生什么。我们希望在资源中心携带可用于这些实验的克隆DNA片段，准确描述它们并将其分发给想要使用它们的科学家。资助这一提案的结果将是成功完成一个完全整合的资源，以细胞和发育生物学家，以促进有效，经济和道德效率的国际级研究。

The European Xenopus Resource Centre was established in September 2006. Its function is to provide wild-type and genetically modified animals to the community of cell and developmental biologists who use the frog as a model for vertebrate development. This function is very important as it is difficult for animals to be easily transported from other countries and there are no commercial suppliers of such animals in the UK. It is also important since housing the animals on one site reduces the total number of animals that need to be looked after in laboratories across the UK, thus reducing the number of animals used in experiments which have to be reported to the Home Office. This proposal asks for funding to extend the objectives of the Centre. In particular the activities of the Centre need to be firmly embedded within a database which is heavily used as a resource by scientists researching on frogs (Xenbase, University of Calgary, Canada). This requires considerable expertise in database handling to write programmes to allow fields to be searched, and patterns of development and gene expression to be described. Using the same systems as Xenbase will ensure that it is easy to move between the Resource Centre and Xenbase sites, thus making use of both site's facilities. This integration of biological data into computer databases is known as bioinformatics. The second part of the proposal extends the range of materials that the Stock Centre will carry and distribute to scientists in the UK and worldwide. Developmental biology is the science which aims to understand how complex organisms arise from a single fertilised egg. Often this involves studying how, when and where genes are expressed in developing embryos and what happens if those genes are mis-expressed. We would like to carry cloned pieces of DNA in the Resource Centre that can be used for these experiments, describe them accurately and distribute them to scientists who want to use them. The outcome from funding this proposal would be the successful completion of a fully integrated resource to cell and developmental biologists to facilitate effective, economically and ethically efficient international class research.