ChickGCE: a novel germ cell EST database for studying the early developmental stage in chickens.
We established a database to study germ cells during the early developmental stage in the chicken. The ChickGCE database provides integrated expressed sequence tag (EST) data from chicken testis, ovary, embryonic gonads, and primordial germ cells. We gathered data on 10,294 ESTs from approximately 1000 embryonic gonads, and we experimentally determined 10,851 ESTs from primordial germ cells purified from 7955 embryonic gonads by magnetically activated cell sorting. The EST testis and ovary datasets were retrieved from the public database of The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR). The EST data were clustered and assembled into unique sequences, contigs, and singletons. The ChickGCE database provides functional annotation, identification, and putative embryonic germ-cell-specific novel transcripts based on the Gene Ontology database, as well as statistical analyses of expression patterns and pair-wise comparisons of two types of tissue- and germ-cell-specific alternative splicing events in the chicken. The new database is accessible online and queries can be answered using several search options, including tissue database searches, keywords, clone IDs, expected values, and BLAST search scores.
Kim
Heebal
H
Department of Food and Animal Biotechnology, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-742, Korea.
Lim
Dajeong
D
Han
Beom Ku
BK
Sung
Samsun
S
Jeon
Mina
M
Moon
Sunjin
S
Kang
Yeonkyung
Y
Nam
Jungrye
J
Han
Jae Yong
JY
D000818:Animals; D002642:Chick Embryo / Q000378:metabolism*; D002645:Chickens / Q000235:genetics*; D019295:Computational Biology; D030561:Databases, Nucleic Acid; D020224:Expressed Sequence Tags; D015870:Gene Expression; D005854:Germ Cells / Q000378:metabolism*