Pig Genome Database

About the PGD

The completion of the pig draft genome sequence marks a milestone in 20 years of pig genome studies. It is important to harvest the information in the pig genome assembly for annotations and genome analysis currently being carried out by the research community, as well as at Ensembl and NCBI. However, it is equally important -- and a challenge -- to piece together all genomics/genetics research results accumulated over the years, to link them so that researchers can mine useful information from an enriched pig genome information resource. We developed the Pig Genome Database (PGD, to serve this purpose. Our focus for developing the PGD has been not only to bring together pig gene expression, quantitative trait loci (QTL), candidate gene, and whole genome association study (WGAS) results, but also to develop tools to facilitate information integration and mining within the pig and across species. The key functions we have developed so far include pig gene pages (a centralized gene search tool), a local copy of Biomart (for customizable genome information queries), genome feature alignment tools (Pig QTLdb and Gbrowse), integrated gene expression information (ANEXDB and ESTdb), a dedicated pig genome and gene set BLAST server, and virtual comparative map database and tools (VCmap). By developing the PGD, it is our aim to collaboratively utilize existing databases and tools via networked functions, such as web services, database API, etc., to maximize the potential of all related databases through the PGD implementation.