STORAGE, VISUALIZATION, AND COMPARATIVE GENOMICS ANALYSIS OF GENE EXPRESSION AND FUNCTIONAL DATA FOR THE PLANARIAN SCHMIDTEA MEDITERRANEA

Includes bibliographical references (pages 28-29).The planarian Schmidtea mediterranea is a member of the phylum Platyhelminthes (flatworms) that has a remarkable ability to regenerate damaged tissues due to the large number of pluripotent stem cells the organism possesses. As such, Schmidtea mediterranea is used as a model for stem cell based regeneration. Microarray experiments were conducted to identify genes involved in regeneration of the Schmidtea mediterranea central nervous system (CNS). Validation of the microarray data has yielded an extensive amount of in situ hybridization, RNA interference (RNAi), and gene annotation data from over 16,000 expressed sequence tags (ESTs). A relational database was developed using MySQL to house this experimental data and a web interface was created using PHP, Perl, and JavaScript to interact with the database. The web interface includes a customizable BLAST search, export, insert, update, and search functions, as well as secure login features. The database and web interface allows users to interact with the data in an intuitive and secure way that will reduce experiment duplication and will create a central repository in which new data can be assimilated and applied to future experiments with ease