With the support of funding from DeepFin, I started my internship with Phenoscape at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in August 2011. My three months here at NESCent have flown by and even though it is my last day, I am just as excited about the project as the day I started! Working with Wasial Dahdul, Peter Midford and Jim Balhoff has enabled me to learn and understand a great deal about databases, collaboration and morphology. Phenoscape has completely changed the way I think about phenotypic characters. Breaking them down into logical statements in Phenex really allows you to understand a character as it fits in the bigger picture. I was able to work with Wasila in forging interdisciplinary ties by contributing to other ontologies and databases, such as PATO and PaleoDB. Additionally, working to assist in the expansion of Phenoscape to incorporate all vertebrates taught me a lot about the origins of vertebrates and the plethora of prehistoric life I did not realize existed- including my new personal favorite prehistoric fish, Jagorina!

NESCent is an amazing place. Being one of the few people here without a higher degree or a long list of publications under their belt, I was initially a little intimidated. However, the informatics group, post-docs and professors have been great and pushed me to participate in seminars and intellectual discussion. This is a stimulating environment that facilitates thinking outside the box and looking at bigger picture issues in evolutionary biology.

I am excited to continue my work on Phenoscape offsite back at the Smithsonian and I hope to contribute throughout my graduate career in Dr. Brian Sidlauskas’s (former NESCentian and Phenoscape tester and contributor) lab at Oregon State University.

Ben Frable
Graduate Student, Oregon State University
Student Researcher, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

We used the Synchronization Tool (an Obo-Edit plugin) to compare XAO to several external ontologies. The tool made it efficient to find and add missing cross-references and terms, and to resolve conflicting data (e.g., differing definitions). By the end of the week, we updated XAO with all relevant terms from the Amphibian Anatomy Ontology (AAO), Vertebrate Anatomy Ontology (VAO), Uber Ontology (UBERON), and Common Anatomy Reference Ontology (CARO).

Erik, VG, and Christina worked hard the rest of the week to make XAO is_a complete and to update definitions, relationships, and synonyms for existing terms. With XAO’s new release, the ontology is now 25% larger than before. The newest version of XAO will be available for downloaded soon from the OBO Foundry.

We presented talks at the Facilitating Anatomy Ontology Interoperability workshop. Jim’s talk was on representing taxa as individuals in OWL, an alternative to the common representation of taxa as classes, which facilitates annotation of phenotypic data involving polymorphism and evolutionary reversals.  I presented a lightning talk on the anatomy ontology synchronization requirements for linking evolutionary and model organism phenotypes.  Other presentations from the workshop are available here. We also presented a poster describing the reasoning used in the Phenoscape Knowledgebase.

The main conference included interesting talks on a broad range of topics including the application of ontologies to proteins, diseases, biological mechanisms, and electronic health records. Presentations can be downloaded here.

1. Development of computational and statistical methodology for measuring semantic similarity between sets of phenotypes, in order to support searches within extremely large phenotype datasets.
2. Development and testing of methods for automatically generating ontologically based phenotype expressions from structured excerpts of natural language.

The position is based in the informatics group at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), and will be administered through the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) under the supervision of Hilmar Lapp at NESCent and Dr. Todd Vision at UNC-CH.   The research will be in collaboration with Dr. Chris Mungall at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Dr. Hong Cui at the University of Arizona.  The project also includes biologists and bioinformaticists from the University of South Dakota, the University of Chicago, the University of Kansas, in addition to the model organism databases for mouse (MGD), zebrafish (ZFIN), and Xenopus (Xenbase).

Applicants should have a PhD in bioinformatics, computational biology or a related field. Prior experience with machine reasoning using ontologies is strongly preferred. The position is for two years, pending satisfactory performance and availability of funds.  To apply, please provide a cover letter, CV, and contact information for three references.  Inquiries and applications may be sent to Hilmar Lapp at hlapp@nescent.org.  The post is open immediately and will remain open until filled.

This RCN envisions building a broad base of community knowledge and resources so as to maximize the research potential of web-based data.  Funding for participation in meetings, presentations and laboratory exchanges for students, postdocs and faculty from ontology and taxonomic domains (initially plants, arthropods, and vertebrates) is available through the RCN (see http://phenotypercn.org/opportunities/.

We are eager to have you join us!  Please sign up for our participant and mailing lists for further information (http://phenotypercn.org/participants/add/) and feel free to contact one of the PIs (Paula Mabee, pmabee@usd.edu; Andy Deans, andy_deans@ncsu.edu; Eva Huala, huala@acoma.stanford.edu; and Suzanna Lewis, selewis@lbl.gov).

Balhoff JP, Dahdul WM, Kothari CR, Lapp H, Lundberg JG, et al. (2010) Phenex: Ontological Annotation of Phenotypic Diversity. PLoS ONE 5(5): e10500. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010500.

Abstract: Phenotypic differences among species have long been systematically itemized and described by biologists in the process of investigating phylogenetic relationships and trait evolution. Traditionally, these descriptions have been expressed in natural language within the context of individual journal publications or monographs. As such, this rich store of phenotype data has been largely unavailable for statistical and computational comparisons across studies or integration with other biological knowledge.  Here we describe Phenex, a platform-independent desktop application designed to facilitate efficient and consistent annotation of phenotypic similarities and differences using Entity-Quality syntax, drawing on terms from community ontologies for anatomical entities, phenotypic qualities, and taxonomic names. Phenex can be configured to load only those ontologies pertinent to a taxonomic group of interest. The graphical user interface was optimized for evolutionary biologists accustomed to working with lists of taxa, characters, character states, and character-by-taxon matrices.  Annotation of phenotypic data using ontologies and globally unique taxonomic identifiers will allow biologists to integrate phenotypic data from different organisms and studies, leveraging decades of work in systematics and comparative morphology.