Germinate: Wheat and Maize Databases for the Seeds of Discovery Project

The ability to merge data from disparate and diverse data sources unlocks great potential in experimental plant genetics; however, with a steady increase of analytical tools available it’s often taxing to store, and subsequently migrate, data between applications.

Taking the Germinate 2 platform as a foundation we have improved the functionality of this system to include tools for the visualization of climate data, internationalization and improved export tools to handle the large volumes of data being presented as part of Seeds of Discovery (http://seedsofdiscovery.org) which is supported through the Mexican Government's MasAgo programme. We have developed the system to easily integrate with analysis tools such as Flapjack (http://bioinf.hutton.ac.uk/flapjack) and CurlyWhirly (http://bioinf.hutton.ac.uk/curlywhirly) which along with Germinate offer a common platform for the analysis and visualization of genetic resources collections.

Germinate can be easily expanded to add custom functionality depending on the scope of the application being developed and has in addition to wheat and maize been used to deploy online resources for a number of plant species including barley, potato, pea and rye grass.

These tools have been developed for the plant community and can be accessed from http://bioinf.hutton.ac.uk/germinate-wheat and http://bioinf.hutton.ac.uk/germinate-maize.