The de.NBI-GCBN Service Centre – A Crop BioGreenformatics Network

GCBN is part of the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI). The three GCBN partners (IPK, HMGU and FZJ) focus on crops and provide tailored specific data and infrastructure to the plant research community. Main objectives are: transparent access to germplasms, improved workflows for plant gene annotation, and bridging of multiple genotypes to phenotypes.

The Genebank at the IPK is one of the largest centers for plant genetic resources worldwide. GCBN aims to systematically collect germplasm data, integrate those with information from other service provider and make it available for analysis. The IPK develops information systems for the integration of germplasm passport data, phenotypic data and genetic data.

The HMGU as GCBN partner is responsible to provide high quality genome and gene annotations for crops. A key service is the provision of a high quality annotation pipeline for a fundamental ad-hoc plant genome annotation.

The aim of the FZJ is to make phenotypes comparable between different labs, or indeed different species. Towards this a common vocabulary must be standardized by the development of phenomics and environmental ontologies. Data will be automatically linked from a genotype to a phenotype based on e.g. genome-wide association and genomic selection methods. Later on, more involved QTL based models will be introduced and delivered to the users.

Furthermore, GCBN is provides multiple other services to access germplasm collections (GBIS, EURISCO), information retrieval over integrated genome annotations (LAILAPS), data sharing and publication services (PGP, e!DAL) and platforms to explore plant genomes (PlantsDB, PlabiPD).