Workshop - Thursday evening, April 10, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Community Contributions to Genome Annotation

Christine Elsik, Georgetown University, will provide training on the Apollo Genome Annotation Curation Tool (described in Lewis et al. 2002 Genome Biology 3:RESEARCH0082).

Workshop participants will learn how to install and configure the Apollo Annotation Editor on their own laptop, access sequence and gene evidence data by connecting to the genome database server, and annotate protein coding gene models.

Elsik is a member of six genome sequencing consortia (honey bee, sea urchin, bovine, wasp, body louse, beetle) and two microarray consortia (bovine and pig). The Elsik lab had a prominent role in the honey bee genome project including development of the consensus predicted gene set, GC content analysis, repeat analysis, microRNA prediction, superscaffold sequence assembly, and organization of gene annotation data.

The cost to attend this optional workshop is $25.  Seating is limited to the first 40 people who register for the Workshop.  The option to register for the Workshop is available when registering to attend the Symposium. 

Workshop - Friday evening, April 11, 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm
Chado: A Database Schema for Integrating Biological Data

Chado is a modular extensible database schema for managing biological data, including sequence, sequence comparisons, phenotypes, genotypes, ontologies, publications, and phylogeny. It has been designed to handle complex representations of biological knowledge and is in widespread use in biological research community. Chado is behind many online databases including BeetleBase, FlyBase, and wFleaBase, to name just a few. Chado is a part of the GMOD project.

The workshop will cover Chado's logical concepts, the types of data it can represent, how to import and export data, and how it integrates with other GMOD components such as Apollo and GBrowse.

Scott Cain and Dave Clements will present the workshop. Scott is the GMOD project coordinator and is a lead developer of Chado and related tools. Scott also works on integration of Chado with other GMOD components including GBrowse, Apollo, and CMap. Dave runs the GMOD help desk, where he maintains the GMOD web site, writes documentation, presents tutorials, and answers user questions.

There is no cost to attend this optional workshop but registration is requested.