Survey: The Application of GMOD in Bioinformatics Research

Bioinformatics is the application of information technology to the field of molecular biology. Bioinformatics research involves lots of genome data and one challenge problem is how to store, analyze and visualize them effectively. Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD), a collection of source software tools for creating and managing genome-scale biological database, has been used to create small laboratory database of genome annotations and large web-accessible community database. Many components, such as Chado, GBrowse, BioMart and Apollo, are mature software with many human-years of software development behind them. The demand for GMOD components has been strong since genome sequence started to appear and many of the first genome database are build using them. Many organizations made contributions for GMOD or build their database or system using GMOD. This paper introduces the GMOD and its application in bioinformatics research.