Integrated Arabidopsis Gene Functional Annotation

To facilitate global gene expression analysis and extract useful information from massive amount of data (e.g., generated by Affymetrix GeneChips and microarrays) to reveal biological insights, we have decided to initiate an effort to classify Arabidopsis genes based on related functions. Although KEGG and TAIR (including GO, AraCyc and gene family databases) have provided substantial information and TIGR and MIPS have offered systematic and updated Arabidopsis gene annotations, there is still a need of community effort to provide more "biologically oriented" information for each individual researcher to effectively analyze expression patterns of the whole plant genome using free or commercially available programs. For instance, there are numerous published research articles and reviews and websites that contain rich and useful information. However, it is impossible for a single person or a single lab to acquire all the information efficiently and use them effectively. Although the information could be systematically collected and organized to some extend by computer programs, its quality and accuracy will be the highest if more researchers can participate in contributing, evaluating and editing the information as an open resource. The ultimate goal of our small effort is to encourage plant scientists working on diverse areas and metabolic and regulatory pathways of Arabidopsis to share their knowledge about gene functions that they have become familiar with through their own work. We believe that this organized information of Arabidopsis gene functions will be applicable to other plant species and useful for comparative plant genome analyses when more plant genome sequences are completed in the future.

The master gene list integrating information collected from all sources in a tab delimited format and an introductory word document can be found here