April 2 Webinar

iBeetle-Base - a phenotypic database with a community edition

The red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum has become an important insect model organism to study gene function and RNAi mediated pest control. iBeetle-Base was developed to document morphological phenotypes from the genome-wide RNAi gene-knockdown screen iBeetle and has become an integrated resource of genomic and phenotypic information for Tribolium castaneum research. Since our last release in 2024, iBeetle-Base allows the community to contribute RNAi phenotypes and associate Gene Ontology terms and publications with Tribolium genes (“community addition”). This novel functionality overcomes the lack of curators for databases of small communities. Further, we improved data accessibility, via programming interfaces alongside traditional HTML pages, which facilitates the automatic usage of the database by scripting and third-party tools. Importantly, this phenotypic database with its special adaptations to small research communities could become the nucleus for other interlinked databases in the future. iBeetle-Base is freely accessible at https://ibeetle-base.uni-goettingen.de/