The Mouse Genome Database (MGD) is the community model organism knowledgebase for the laboratory mouse. MGD contains comprehensive information about mouse gene function, genotype-to-phenotype annotations, and mouse models of human disease (1). The mission of the MGD is to advance the use of the laboratory mouse as a model system for investigating the genetic and genomic basis of human health and disease. MGD maintains a comprehensive catalog of mouse genes and genome features connected to genomic sequence data and biological annotations. Annotations include (i) molecular function, biological process and cellular location of genes using terms and relations of the Gene Ontology (GO) (see Gene Ontology Consortium,2), (ii) mutations, variants and human disease models using terms from the Mammalian Phenotype Ontology (MP) and Disease Ontology (DO) and (iii) official nomenclature and identifiers for mouse gene names, symbols, alleles and strains (Table 1). The rigorous application of nomenclature and annotation standards in MGD ensures that the information in the resource is curated consistently to support robust and comprehensive data retrieval for sets of genes that share biological properties and data mining for knowledge discovery.
