The Roslin-Hub: Sharing Functional Annotations for Farmed and Companion Animals

Complete genome sequences provide the means for understanding the biology of organisms. With many of the farmed and companion animal genomes now sequenced (cod, duck, chicken, turkey, pig, cow, sheep, cat etc.) and protein coding gene annotations made available, the focus is now shifting towards understanding the functional relevance of non-protein coding regions of these genomes.

Genome wide NGS datasets from functional assays (e.g. ChIP-Seq) can be used to locate transcription factor binding sites, histone modifications or chromatin modifying complexes. This information is vital to our understanding of the spatial and temporal changes in gene expression and in turn the understanding of the biology of development and disease. Although such datasets are now widely available for various human cell types, accumulation of similar datasets for famed and companion animals needs a joint effort of the diverse research communities and effective ways to share the data and the resulting functional annotations.

Here we present the Roslin-hub, a track-hub, which aims to provide functional annotations for farmed and companion animals. By working with the research communities, our aim is to manage and integrate publicly available datasets and to share functional annotations obtained by analysing the data. The Roslin-hub, as a web accessible location, provides ease of access to functional annotations from transcription factor binding sites to epigenetic modifications for farmed animals. The annotations shared via the track-hub can be uploaded to genome browsers like the Ensembl Genome Browser which in turn provides visualization of the data along with the native annotation tracks.