The MGIS development team at Bioversity and its many partners are pleased to publish a new release of MGIS. The purpose of MGIS is to provide the most comprehensive information related to Musa Germplasm accessions maintained in the global in vitro collection at Bioversity's International Transit Centre in Leuven, Belgium.
A critical improvement that needed to be made was to ensure due recognition and acknowledgement of the many and different Data providers on which MGIS depends for data quality and completion. In order to do so, Bioversity, on behalf of MGIS, developed in 2012 a Data Sharing Agreement (DSA) to clearly define the terms and conditions of the Data provider and owners (the many collection curators) and of the Data publisher and manager (Bioversity). For this new version of MGIS we decided to make publicly available only the data from collections that signed the DSA and provided us with an update of their Data. The data collected in the past are NOT lost, they have been archived and are not searchable anymore by default. We will incorporate updated data as soon as they arise, after signature of the DSA.
Another improvement is the display of diversity trees based on molecular markers and information from several studies and results from the Musa Genotyping Centre, hosted at the Institute of Experimental Botany (IEB), Czech Republic. Several datasets from SSR and SNP markers are included in MGIS and are now linked to accession pages. MGIS intends therefore to manage genotyping data from Genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS), and link them with the genomic context available in the Banana Genome Hub (under development).
Other improvements made include:
- All information on a single accession can be viewed in one page,
- taxonomic content of each collection is summarized graphically,
- easier data filtering and export functions,
- users can share comments on any accession. To do so, users need to register on the website,
- accessions can be requested online via the Musa Online Requesting system (MORS) with a modified interface. (Please note: it will be necessary to create a new account to access the new MORS.).
Technological corner:
The MGIS database was migrated to the GMOD Chado schema to benefit from the bioinformatics community developments that are now addressing a wide range of data structures from sequence to phenotype, including multi-location experiments that will allow the storing of germplasm evaluation data. The website is powered by Drupal with the Tripal module.
We hope you will appreciate the improvement made in this new version. We would be grateful for any user feedback. Please do not hesitate to contact us with comments questions.
The MGIS team