The Alliance of Genome Resources (the Alliance) announces the release of the Alliance of Genome Resources website 1.0 – providing unified access to comparative genetics and genomics data from the Alliance data resources (www.alliancegenome.org). The Alliance brings together the efforts of the major National Institutes of Health NHGRI-funded Model Organism Database (MOD) groups, and the Gene Ontology Consortium, in a synergistic integration of expertly-curated information about the functioning of cellular systems. Our focus is to facilitate the use of these data towards better understanding of human biology and disease.

Created during the early days of the Human Genome Project, and in support of the major experimental models for human biology, the MODs currently included in the Alliance are the Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD), FlyBase, WormBase, Mouse Genome Database (MGD), Rat Genome Database (RGD), and Zebrafish Information Network (ZFIN).  In addition, the Alliance includes the Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium. Now these groups will merge key activities and data representations, coordinating data retrieval and analysis, within a comparative perspective. Other MODs and related resources will be added to the Alliance going forward.  

As part of this initial release, Alliance working groups have focused on the ability to easily access pages that summarize details of Genes and Diseases, with extensive representation of orthology data, and with access to multi-track JBrowse capabilities primarily for visualization of sequence data. Users recover gene details, functional information, and disease associations within a comparative perspective. As the integration of the MOD and GO teams progresses with inclusion of additional data, the vision going forward includes the incorporation of other model organism information resources and other bioinformatic nodes within a common data platform, facilitating data recovery, analysis, and integration.