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Browse a roundworm: visit http://www.wormbase.org Credit: NHGRI

Caenorhabditis elegans, the favourite worm of developmental biology, now has its own Internet portal site. Wormbase, which can be found at http://www.wormbase.org, aims to bring together all available information on the millimetre-long soil nematode's genetics and biology.

Consisting of just 959 cells, the fates of which have been meticulously catalogued, the roundworm C. elegans is the leading model organism in developmental biology. Last year, it became the first complex organism to have its genome sequenced. Wormbase aims to integrate these data, and make them accessible to any biologist — not just those with expert knowledge of C. elegans.

“We want to make the database fun and easy to use, so that you don't have to be a roundworm insider to use it,” says Paul Sternberg of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Sternberg is leading the project, together with Lincoln Stein of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York, and Jean Thierry-Mieg of the Centre de Recherches de Biochimie Macromoléculaire in Montpellier.

John Spieth of the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis and Richard Durbin from the Sanger Centre near Cambridge in England, representing the two centres that sequenced the worm's genome, are also on board.

Until now, admits Sternberg, biologists outside the 1500-strong roundworm community may have found its obscure nomenclature off-putting. Few, for example, would have any idea that a cell called AB.alaaappr is the parent cell of AVDR, an important interneuron in the worm's ventral cord.

Wormbase users will require no such insider knowledge. “You will be able to come into Wormbase from a paper, a cell or a gene, or even a process,” says Sternberg. For instance, the site will eventually allow users to zoom in on photographs of the worm and see what cells such as AB.alaaappr look like, what they do, and which cells they are sitting next to. It will also document where and when each of the 19,000 genes in the worm's 97-million-base-pair genome is expressed.

“What is special about C. elegans is that we can see which genes are being expressed in which cell,” says Sternberg, “and that we know what each of the cells does, and how they relate to each other.” Ultimately, all the information should be available for a series of stages in the worm's development.

Wormbase is an example of a ‘vertical’ database that integrates many types of information about a single organism. Its model is Flybase, which serves researchers working on the fruitfly Drosophila. Sternberg believes that having the worm genome sequence early on was in some ways a disadvantage, as the focus on sequencing led to neglect of collating the literature on the worm's wider biology. The Drosophila community had to wait until earlier this month to get its genome, and wisely spent the waiting time in building up the Flybase portal, says Sternberg.

Another challenge for Wormbase will be interfacing its vertical information with the larger ‘horizontal’ databases, such as the GenBank sequence database, which span many species.