Fourmidable: A database for ant genomics

Abstract

Background: Fourmidable is an infrastructure to curate and share the emerging genetic, molecular, and functional genomic data and protocols for ants. Description: The Fourmidable assembly pipeline groups nucleotide sequences into clusters before independently assembling each cluster. Subsequently, assembled sequences are annotated via Interproscan and BLAST against general and insect-specific databases. Gene-specific information can be retrieved using gene identifiers, searching for similar sequences or browsing through inferred Gene Ontology annotations. The database will readily scale as ultra-high throughput sequence data and sequences from additional species become available. Conclusion: Fourmidable currently houses EST data from two ant species and microarray gene expression data for one of these. Fourmidable is publicly available at http://fourmidable.unil.ch. © 2009 Wurm et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.