Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) Genome Annotation Workshop Series

July 14-16, 2008

Plant-Associated Microbe Gene Ontology (PAMGO) Training Workshop

July 16-18, 2008

Oomycete Bioinformatics Training Workshop

For details on the workshops, including fellowship application and registration, visit: http://www.cpe.vt.edu/vbi-genome/

Jan 23, 2007

The PAMGO consortium, in collaboration with the Gene Ontology Consortium has approved and released 472 new terms for describing gene products involved in microbial-host interactions. View the new PAMGO terms (ID prefix: GO:0052) under “multi-organism processes” in the GO browser (AMIGO: http://www.godatabase.org).

Introduction to PAMGO

The PAMGO interest group was formed to develop new gene ontology (GO) terms describing the various processes, functions and cellular components related to microbe-host interactions. Plant-associated microbes have evolved similar mechanisms to evade, neutralize or suppress defense systems of their plant hosts and obtain nutrients. Such similarities can only be discovered if a controlled vocabulary is set in place to describe these processes amongst diverse microbe-host interactions.

In a multi-institutional collaborative effort, we are currently working on developing new GO terms and relationships for gene products implicated in plant interactions in the bacterial pathogens, Erwinia chrysanthemi, Pseudomonas syringae pv tomato and Agrobacterium tumefaciens, the fungus Magnaporthe grisea, the oomycetes Phytophthora sojae and Phytophthora ramorum and the nematode Meloidogyne hapla.

Most terms developed are housed under the  “multi organism process node“ previously the “interaction between organisms” node in the GO Biological Process ontology. This collaborative effort has since led to the establishment of 585 terms in the GO Biological Process ontology. Four hundred and seventy two (472) of these terms, recently incorporated into the Biological Process ontology describe more specific processes involved in the interaction between microbes and their hosts. Relevant gene products from the genome sequences of the reference genomes listed above are currently being annotated with the new terms.

                                                      PAMGO workshop at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, August 2007.