Generic Model Organism Database

The GMOD project was started in the early 2000s as a collaboration between several model organism databases (MODs) who shared a need to create similar software tools for processing data from sequencing projects. MODs, or organism-specific databases, describe genome and other information about important experimental organisms in the life sciences and capture the large volumes of data and information being generated by modern biology. Rather than each group designing their own software, four major MODs--FlyBase, Saccharomyces Genome Database, Mouse Genome Database, and WormBase—worked together to create applications that provide functionality needed by all MODs, such as software to help manage the data within the MOD, and to help users access and query the data.

The GMOD project works to keep software components interoperable. To this end, many of the tools use a common input/output file format or run off a Chado schema database.

The Chado[1] schema aims to cover many of the classes of data frequently used by modern biologists, from genetic data to phylogenetic trees to publications to organisms to microarray data to IDs to RNA/protein expression. Chado makes extensive use of controlled vocabularies to type all entities in the database; for example: genes, transcripts, exons, transposable elements, etc., are stored in a feature table, with the type provided by Sequence Ontology. When a new type is added to the Sequence Ontology, the feature table requires no modification, only an update of the data in the database. The same is largely true of analysis data that can be stored in Chado as well.

The existing core modules of Chado are:

• sequence - for sequences/features
• cv - for controlled-vocabs/ontologies
• general - currently just dbxrefs
• organism - taxonomic data
• pub - publication and references
• companalysis - augments sequence module with computational analysis data
• map - non-sequence maps
• genetic - genetic and phenotypic data
• expression - gene expression
• natural diversity - population data

The full list of GMOD software components is found on the GMOD Components page. These components include:

The following organism databases are contributing to and/or adopting GMOD components for model organism databases.

• Bioperl, BioJava, Biopython, BioRuby, etc.
• Ensembl
• Gene Ontology
• DAS
• Genomics Unified Schema
• Manatee: Manual Annotation Tool
• Biocurator.org
• Open Biomedical Ontologies
• Sequence Ontology Project

• Biological database
• Genome project
• Genomics
• Genome
• Genome Compiler – an all-in-one software platform for DNA design & visualization, data management and collaboration.

• GMOD website