The i5k Workspace@Nal - a Tripal Based Arthropod Genome Portal

The 5000 arthropod genomes initiative (i5k) has tasked itself with coordinating the sequencing of 5000 insect or related arthropod genomes. Much of the data is being generated from small research groups or communities with little bioinformatics experience and/or big data infrastructure. There is still a significant gap between the generation of data through genome sequencing, assembly and automated feature prediction and the dissemination of these data via genome portals. The National Agricultural Library (NAL) has implemented the i5k Workspace@NAL (http://i5k.nal.usda.gov/) as a centralized platform to help meet the i5k initiative's genome hosting needs.

The i5k Workspace@NAL portal is built on the Tripal framework, taking advantage of the Drupal CMS and the connection to the Chado schema. The data stored in the Chado database are used to display our organism, gene and project related pages via Tripal. All of our resources are open source, and in addition to Tripal for content management and connectivity to the Chado backend, we have implemented a custom BLAST interface for sequence searching, JBrowse for genome visualization and Web Apollo for manual annotation.

As of November 2014, the i5k Workspace@NAL incorporates 38 arthropod species, including species relevant to agriculture, invasion biology, systematics, ecology, evolution, and developmental research. Any research group with an arthropod genome in need of our resources is encouraged to contact the i5k Workspace with their genome project details.