Genestorian: a web application to document and trace genetic modifications in model organism and cell line collections.

Currently, no open standards exist to unambiguously describe cloning strategies, genotypes and allele inheritance. Consequently, laboratories often store their plasmids, cell lines and strains in spreadsheets or text-based systems, which are necessarily inconsistent and differ between collections. Therefore, for curators or even members of a laboratory, it can be time-consuming or impossible to know the sequence and provenance of a plasmid or allele. Since biological knowledge bases (UniProt, model organism databases, etc.) rely on links between gene variants and phenotypes to annotate functions to gene products, the current situation limits the reusability of biological resources and the broad impact of research.

I propose to develop Genestorian, a web application to manage collections of oligonucleotides, plasmids, strains and cell lines where sequences can be traced through cloning steps up to their entry into the collection. Researchers will plan the generation of new resources from existing ones, with new sequences generated by in silico cloning. Consequently, data standardisation will occur at the planning stage, and will not be a burden at submission stages. It will be easy to query the collection, access the sequence, ancestry and progeny of resources, and export this information for the methods section of a paper or in a standard format. Standardisation will enable information exchange between laboratory collections, journals, knowledge bases and resource repositories. Therefore, Genestorian aligns with the European Union commitment to Open Science and will promote resource reusability and maximise the impact of genetic research, facilitating its reproducibility and interpretation by tracing results to specific DNA sequences.