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Peer-reviewed research articles remain the best medium for representing and disseminating the refinement of scientific knowledge. For any model organism database (MOD), the literature is one of the main data sources, and significant resources are devoted to capturing this information. This project is a collaboration between the Arabidopsis Information Resource, TAIR and the Rat Genome Database, RGD, two MODs with an emphasis on literature curation. Here, we propose to develop a literature curation tool that fulfills fundamental needs of a MOD in extracting information from the literature.

Three major components of this system are:

• importing articles from various literature databases;
• storing, screening, prioritizing, and curating articles; and
• tracking of prioritized articles through the manual curation procedure.

Our long-term goal is to develop a set of systematic procedures and tools for integrating knowledge from the confined context of a research article into the dynamic, broad context of a model organism database. Both groups have developed different software components to facilitate in-house curation efforts and we propose to integrate these components to build a powerful, portable, and generic literature curation system. By building upon the existing developments undertaken at both sites and working together to achieve an integrated literature curation solution, we will maximize the utility and flexibility of the system we create. The system will be central to the curation efforts of the collaborating databases and will be useable as a whole or in parts by other existing or emerging MODs.

Our proposed Specific Aims are as follows:

1. Expand and enhance existing RGD modules to create a robust, extensible literature database search and retrieval module, PubFetch. This will enable literature retrieval from multiple literature databases using a consistent data exchange format.
   
2. Extend and improve TAIR PubSearch tool to provide a robust, adaptable curation module to store, search, annotate and prioritize articles for MOD curation. This will use the PubFetch module as its literature data source, allow curators to screen, prioritize, and curate information in the literature, and provide output in a standard data format for MODs.
   
3. Create a literature tracking module, PubTrack, to track and report the status of article curation by the MOD curation team. This will be designed to interface with the PubSearch or an existing MOD literature database, and will be configurable to reflect the curation process used by any individual MOD.
   

   This project has been funded by the National Human Genome Institute (NHGRI) grant number R01HG02728.