Vol. 25, No. 3, 2012 / 271 MPMI Vol. 25, No. 3, 2012, pp. 271–278. http://dx.doi.org/10.1094/MPMI-07-11-0183. © 2012 The American Phytopathological Society TECHNICAL ADVANCE MGOS: Development of a Community Annotation Database for Magnaporthe oryzae Anupreet Kour, 1 Kevin Greer, 2 Barbara Valent, 3 Marc J. Orbach, 1,2 and Carol Soderlund 2 1 School of Plant Sciences. Division of Plant Pathology and Microbiology, The University of Arizona, Tucson 85721, U.S.A.; 2 BIO5 Institute, The University of Arizona, Tucson 85719, U.S.A.; 3 Department of Plant Pathology, Kansas State University, Manhattan 66506-5502, U.S.A. Submitted 7 July 2011. Accepted 1 November 2011. Magnaporthe oryzae causes rice blast disease, which is the most serious disease of cultivated rice worldwide. We pre- viously developed the Magnaporthe grisea–Orzya sativa (MGOS) database as a repository for the M. oryzae and rice genome sequences together with a comprehensive set of functional interaction data generated by a major consortium of U.S. researchers. The MGOS database has now under- gone a major redesign to include data from the international blast research community, accessible with a new intuitive, easy-to-use interface. Registered database users can manu- ally annotate gene sequences and features as well as add mutant data and literature on individual gene pages. Over 900 genes have been manually curated based on various bio- logical databases and the scientific literature. Gene names and descriptions, gene ontology annotations, published and unpublished information on mutants and their phenotypes, responses in diverse microarray analyses, and related litera- ture have been incorporated. Thus far, 362 M. oryzae genes have associated information on mutants. MGOS is now poised to become a one-stop repository for all structural and functional data available on all genes of this critically impor- tant rice pathogen. Rice blast is the most important disease that affects global rice production. The importance of this disease to food secu- rity is underscored by the fact that rice contributes 23% of the calories consumed by the global human population (Wilson and Talbot 2009). Rice is the most important food product in Asia, where 55% of the world’s population lives and 92% of rice is grown and consumed. The durability of many blast-re- sistant cultivars of rice is poor, with a typical field life of only two to three growing seasons before disease resistance is over- come. Furthermore, rising energy costs impact production by affecting fungicide and fertilizer prices (Ou 1985; Wang and Valent 2009). Thus, there is a need for a better understanding of this disease so that environmentally sustainable pathogen control strategies can be deployed toward increasing the effi- ciency of cereal cultivation. Rice blast disease is caused by the filamentous ascomycete fungus Magnaporthe oryzae. The availability of the M. oryzae genome sequence has fundamentally altered the manner in which the biology of rice blast disease can be explored (Dean et al. 2005). The version 6 of Broad Institute genome assembly of M. oryzae that was used for redesign of the Magnaporthe grisea–Orzya sativa (MGOS) database shows a genome size of 41.7 Mb with 11,074 genes. Of these genes, approximately 35% have a known or predicted role, and a few pathogenicity genes and avirulence effector genes have also been character- ized (Ebbole 2007; Wilson and Talbot 2009). Nevertheless, de- tailed knowledge of the regulation of pathogen functions (such as adhesion, penetration, and invasive growth) and their con- trol (e.g., how the surface cues perceived by the fungus are linked to the activation and operation of cAMP and PMK1 mi- togen-activated protein kinase pathways) in this fungus are limited. Development of the MGOS database is our effort to help the international scientific community to understand the mechanisms involved in pathogenesis. Availability of the whole genome sequence, mutant information, and gene expres- sion data, along with manual curation, makes this database a valuable community resource. Biological databases have become one of the principal drivers of research and innovation in biology. For fungi, model organ- ism databases, such as the Saccharomyces genome database (Christie et al. 2009), the Aspergillus genome databases, and the Candida genome database, contain enormous amounts of high-quality annotated data and are an excellent source of information on fungal genome-scale biology. Moreover, these databases contain genome statistics as well as information on gene names, descriptions, gene ontology (GO) annotations, mutant phenotypes, expression data, and related literature. Ge- nome browser options provide a clear view of the genome and its features, and web-based research tools are provided for ac- cessing and exploring the data. Variable degrees of community annotation are also present in these databases. A complete set of annotation data provides the most detailed picture available for each locus, including all clues to gene function. Such se- quence annotations are crucial resources for the scientific com- munity engaged in identification and characterization of genes and their products (Stein 2001). Inaccuracies in automatic gene identification and function annotations provide challenges for any database (Menda et al. 2008). With this in mind, we have expanded the MGOS database to provide a user-friendly com- munity annotation interface for Magnaporthe spp. Originally, the MGOS database was developed to store ex- perimental data from both the host and pathogen in order to study the interactions between rice and the rice blast fungus (Soderlund et al. 2006). The focus of the database has changed Corresponding authors: M. J. Orbach; E-mail: orbachmj@ag.arizona.edu and C. Soderlund; E-mail: cari@agcol.arizona.edu * The e -Xtra logo stands for “electronic extra” and indicates that Figures 1 through 6 appear in color online. e - Xt ra *