Fourmidable: a database for ant genomics

Abstract

Abstract Background Fourmidable is an infrastructure to curate and share the emerging genetic, molecular, and functional genomic data and protocols for ants. Description The Fourmidable assembly pipeline groups nucleotide sequences into clusters before independently assembling each cluster. Subsequently, assembled sequences are annotated via Interproscan and BLAST against general and insect-specific databases. Gene-specific information can be retrieved using gene identifiers, searching for similar sequences or browsing through inferred Gene Ontology annotations. The database will readily scale as ultra-high throughput sequence data and sequences from additional species become available. Conclusion Fourmidable currently houses EST data from two ant species and microarray gene expression data for one of these. Fourmidable is publicly available at http://fourmidable.unil.ch