GDR/CottonGen: Converting Legacy Sites to Tripal

The Genome Database for Rosaceae (GDR, http:/www.rosaceae.org), initiated in 2002, is the central repository and data mining resource for Rosaceae research. GDR has recently been rebuilt using Tripal, the database construction toolkit that combines the power of Drupal and Chado.  CottonGen (http://www.cottongen.org), which supersedes CottonDB and Cotton Marker Database, has also been built using Tripal. One of the main reasons for using Tripal was the flexibility of the underlying database schema, Chado. The rapid advance of the methodology and techniques in biology continuously produce new data types and metadata. To handle this, the in-house database schema need to be continuously changed, which requires a lot of maintenance and rewriting of numerous codes for uploading and displaying the data. The flexibility of Chado avoids this problem and the availability of Tripal which displays the content in Chado makes the web construction much more efficient. This presentation will discuss the process of the converting the two major databases, including how the various data is stored in Chado. The talk will also show the Tripal modules to display gene, sequence, marker, QTL, genotype and publication data that have been developed.