Tritigate: Accessible Web-Based Analysis of the Wheat Transcriptome

Compared with many other areas of bioinformatics, such as medicine, there are relatively few public databases and tools available specifically for wheat 'omics, and for plants in general. However, the analyses are complex given the size of plant genomes and the prevalence of repeated motifs.

Toxygates is a web-based integrated analysis tool used in drug informatics and toxicogenomics, which was developed at NIBIOHN in Osaka, Japan. By modifying Toxygates, we have developed the new tool Tritigate, a tool for studying wheat transcriptomics, which we discuss in this talk. In its current state, Tritigate integrates RNA-seq wheat data from several studies with MIPS annotations and annotations such as KEGG pathways, GO terms and POPSEQ genetic map distances. Users can inspect gene expression levels, browse time series of expression data in various tissues under different plant conditions, as well as browse by annotations such as individual pathways.

Tritigate is largely based on data in the RDF format, which is now becoming increasingly popular in bioinformatics. The RDF standard has the potential to help plant genomics researchers publish and continuously integrate data.

At this time, we are making a beta version of Tritigate available to the public, and improvements and additional data will be made available gradually in the future.