Abstract

The many advantages of the Xenopus experimental system for investigating vertebrate development are limited by the small number of database resources that exist to support this work. This deficit also affects the usefulness of Xenopus data to researchers using other model organism systems. A number of database resources are available, and the applicability of these resources to Xenopus researchers is described. The power of relational databases is also explored as well as the methods that are being used by Xenbase to build an object-relational database that allows users to integrate data from multiple sources, such as literature, gene sequence, sequence annotation and gene expression.

Keywords: model organisms, mod, bioinformatics, gene expression