MGD is one of the founding members of the Alliance of Genome Resources, a new data resource integration effort among the major model organism (MOD) database groups and the Gene Ontology Consortium (GOC). The other founding members of the Alliance are FlyBase, WormBase, Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD), Rat Genome Database (RGD) and the Zebrafish Information Network (ZFIN). The Alliance is standardizing access to common data types from different model organisms to better support comparative biology investigations for biomedical researchers (15). Genetic and genomic data for the laboratory mouse that are curated by MGD are available from the public web portal for the Alliance (http://www.alliancegenome.org). Data types accessible from the Alliance web site currently include gene names and symbols, genome locations, orthology, function annotations, and disease associations. New data types (e.g. gene expression, interactions, etc.) are being added to the site regularly. The Alliance serves as one of the designated Data Stewards for the NIH Data Commons Pilot Project, providing access to model organism data and annotations via APIs to promote the development of the next generation of cloud-based data access and analysis platforms in genome biology.
