05/23 – RGD announces the addition of chinchilla data

You may have thought that chinchillas, originally from the South American Andes mountains, were valued only as a soft, dense fur source for coats, but due to the anatomical and physiological similarities between the chinchilla and human inner ear, it is an established model for studying the physiology, development and function of the auditory system. The rodent has been used in several research areas, including otitis media, upper respiratory tract infections, hearing, psychoacoustics and ototoxicity. The chinchilla is increasingly being used to investigate the pathobiology of bacterial and viral infections. It is also employed in studies of renal physiology, heart anatomy and vaccine evaluation¹.

Once you have one or more chinchilla genes, you can use RGD’s Analysis and Visualization tools to explore your gene set.

• Use the Chinchilla JBrowse genome browser to view the genomic neighborhood for your gene or genes of interest.
• Perform complex queries for chinchilla genes using the OLGA advanced search tool.
• The Gene Annotator (GA) Tool gives you access to all of the functional annotations for your gene list and their orthologs. A limited set of manual functional annotations are assigned to chinchilla genes at present, as well as weekly updated inferred annotations from orthologous human genes for disease, gene ontology (GO) and pathway. An example is fibronectin 1, Fn1, which has manual and inferred disease and GO annotations and inferred pathway annotations.

Reference:

¹The Chinchilla Research Resource Database: resource for an otolaryngology disease model. Shimoyama M, et al.  (2016) Database.  doi: 10.1093/database/baw073.  PMID:27173523