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The Internet-Based Fungal Pathogen Database: A Proposed Model

First to eighth authors: Department of Plant Pathology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park 16802; ninth author: Department of Plant Pathology, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville 72701; tenth author: Codex Bioinformatics Services, 5074 Baltimore St., San Diego, CA 92117; eleventh and twelfth authors: School of Agricultural Biotechnology, Seoul National University, Suwon 441-744, Korea; thirteenth author: USDA-ARS, 1636 E. Alisal St., Salinas, CA 93905; and fourteenth author: Department of Plant Pathology, University of California, USDA Station, 1636 E. Alisal St., Salinas 93905

A better understanding of the phenotypic and genetic diversity of significant agricultural pathogens and how their populations change in the field is critical for designing successful, long-term disease management strategies. Although efforts to determine the genetic diversity of plant pathogens have substantially increased in recent years, mainly due to the availability of various molecular tools, complementary efforts to archive and integrate the resulting data have been very limited. As a consequence, it is often difficult to compare the available data from various laboratories because the data have been generated by diverse tools, often preventing any direct comparisons, and are saved in a format that is unsuitable for comparative studies. The establishment of an internet-based database that cross-links the digitized genotypic and phenotypic information of individual pathogens at both the species and population levels may allow us to effectively address these problems by coordinating the generation of data and its subsequent archiving. We discuss the needs, benefits, and potential structure of such a database.

Additional keywords: amplified fragment length polymorphism, Fusarium, Magnaporthe grisea, microsatellites, mycotoxins.