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A joint CASIMIR/Interphenome Workshop on describing and reporting phenotypes will be held in Cambridge (UK) on 15-16th September 2008, immediately before the CASIMIR mid-term meeting. The workshop will focus on the use of phenotype ontologies for data description and data reporting and Minimum Information standards for reporting phenotyping experiments. Click CASIMIR-agenda v2.pdf for a draft agenda.

Project Overview

To understand relationships between genotype and phenotype we need to be able to relate genomics and phenomics data. There are well-established databases for genomics information, but phenomics data are fragmented, and much is not publicly available. For mouse data, this is partly because various types of phenomics information have been gathered (e.g. baseline data on inbred strains in the Mouse Phenome Project and EUMORPHIA; recombinant inbred strain data in GeneNetwork.org; phenotype characterization of mutant genotypes by Mouse Genome Informatics; high throughput data from various mutagenesis and knockout projects) and partly because different groups have different conceptions of how to represent data of this type. Unlike sequence data, there has been no international effort to collect mouse phenotype data in one place.

In February 2006, and subsequently, a group representing many of the centres holding these disparate types of mouse phenotype data have met to discuss how to make their resources accessible to the mouse community as seamlessly as possible. We propose to establish a single portal that will allow phenome data to be collectively searched for phenotypes and associated information. This will involve us in implementing some unifying technology and raises important issues, in particular what should be the common ontological representation of phenotype information (there are ongoing efforts to unify ontological descriptions of phenotypes under the auspices of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, and whether it is necessary to define minimum information for the description of phenotyping experiments.

The Mouse Phenotype Database Integration Consortium (2007) Integration of mouse phenome data resources. Mamm Genome. 2007 Apr 10; 18(3). [Epub ahead of print] PubMed