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MGOS: Development of a Community Annotation Database for Magnaporthe oryzae

¹School of Plant Sciences, Division of Plant Pathology and Microbiology, The University of Arizona, Tucson 85721, U.S.A.; ²BIO5 Institute, The University of Arizona, Tucson 85719, U.S.A.; ³Department of Plant Pathology, Kansas State University, Manhattan 66506-5502, U.S.A.

Magnaporthe oryzae causes rice blast disease, which is the most serious disease of cultivated rice worldwide. We previously developed the Magnaporthe grisea–Orzya sativa (MGOS) database as a repository for the M. oryzae and rice genome sequences together with a comprehensive set of functional interaction data generated by a major consortium of U.S. researchers. The MGOS database has now undergone a major redesign to include data from the international blast research community, accessible with a new intuitive, easy-to-use interface. Registered database users can manually annotate gene sequences and features as well as add mutant data and literature on individual gene pages. Over 900 genes have been manually curated based on various biological databases and the scientific literature. Gene names and descriptions, gene ontology annotations, published and unpublished information on mutants and their phenotypes, responses in diverse microarray analyses, and related literature have been incorporated. Thus far, 362 M. oryzae genes have associated information on mutants. MGOS is now poised to become a one-stop repository for all structural and functional data available on all genes of this critically important rice pathogen.