CornCyc at MaizeGDB: Curation and Use Cases

Several resources exist for modeling metabolic networks and biochemical pathways for maize. One of these is CornCyc, created as part of the Plant Metabolic Networks project and in collaboration with MaizeGDB.  The goal is to help understand how gene products interact within the cell to create desired phenotypes driven by the underlying genotype. Much of CornCyc data is computationally inferred from previously annotated Arabidopsis and rice proteins with similar sequence. To make the maize pathway predictions more robust, manual curation is underway, and is planned over the next 5 years for selected pathways. The methods for curation include using the Pathway-Tools curation interface, and scripts-based updates for less complex data, such as Gene Ontology annotations and proteomics based cell-localization information.  Data can be propagated to Plant Metabolics Networks (experimentally documented and inferred pathwyas) and to MetaCyc (experimentally documented pathways in any species). In addition, GO annotations for pathways, along with those for non-metabolic pathways transfer to UniProt. All CornCyc annotations are publicly available for download via MaizeGDB. Example use cases for CornCyc will be presented, both for the Web interface, and for the desktop interface that can be downloaded.

We thank the  USDA ARS, NCGA, and NSF for research support.