Title

Authors

Affiliation

¹Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Towson University, Towson, MD 21252, USA; ²Genetic Improvement of Fruits and Vegetables Laboratory, USDA-ARS, Beltsville, MD 20705, USA

Email

nalkharouf@towson.edu; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Database

Date

Received September 30, 2013; Accepted September 30, 2013; Published October 16, 2013

Blueberry is an economically and nutritionally important small fruit crop, native to North America. As with many crops, extreme low temperature can affect blueberry crop yield negatively and cause major losses to growers. For this reason, blueberry breeding programs have focused on developing improved cultivars with broader climatic adaptation. To help achieve this goal, the blueberry genomic database (BBGD454) was developed to provide the research community with valuable resources to identify genes that play an important role in flower bud and fruit development, cold acclimation and chilling accumulation in blueberry. The database was developed using SQLServer2008 to house 454 transcript sequences, annotations and gene expression profiles of blueberry genes. BBGD454 can be accessed publically from a web-based interface; this website provides search and browse functionalities to allow scientists to access and search the data in order to correlate gene expression with gene function in different stages of blueberry fruit ripening, at different stages of cold acclimation of flower buds, and in leaves.

Availability

http://bioinformatics.towson.edu/BBGD454/

Keywords

Blueberry, database, 454, transcriptomics.

Citation

Darwish et al.   Bioinformation 9(17): 883-886 (2013)

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.