About us People & groups

The Samples, Phenotypes and Ontologies Team  led by Helen Parkinson was formed on July 1 2013 and consists of three sub-teams: the former Functional Genomics Production Team Mouse Informatics, and the Gene Ontology Editorial Office. This move consolidates previous activities and re-focuses the team on meta data integration, ontology development and supporting tooling, development and delivery of content for the EBI's BioSample database and delivery of mouse data for the biomedical research community. The team continues to support submissions and perform curation for ArrayExpress and the Gene Expression Atlas databases. 

The Mouse-Informatics sub-team led by Project Leads Terry Meehan and Gautier Koscielny develops international infrastucture for mouse data archiving, integration and dissemination. The team is a partner on several international projects, including: The International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium (IMPC), KOMP2, INFRAFRONTIER-I3, EUCOMMTOOLS, PhenoImageShare and InfraCoMP. All these externally funded projects share a common theme of using animal models to better understand gene function and how genetic variation contributes to disease.

The Gene Ontology Editorial Office led by the GO Coordinator Jane Lomax coordinates the delivery of the Gene Ontology including adding terms and revising the Ontology's content and structure, alignment with other ontologies e.g. Chemicals, Anatomy and Cell Type, training, software testing and development and outreach.

Members of the team work with external collaborators on projects funded by the European Commission, the BBSRC, the Wellcome Trust, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. These range from data analysis and generation projects such as Sybaris, investigating genome content and gene expression in fungal pathogens, to infrastructural projects such as BioMedBridges, which develops integrative software to link different biomedical domains. The team collaborates on ontology related projects with the National Center for BioOntology in the US and with NIH support is developing tools for ontology manipulation and for the semantic web to support functional genomics data integration and analysis and with the Gene Ontology Consortium. In collaboation with partners in the KOMP2 project and the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium, the team manages, analyses, and distributes complex phenotypic data from 20,000 knockout mouse lines and, in the context of the InfraCOMP project, promotes mouse data integration in Europe. The team also develops open-source software tools for managing data, developing and integrating ontologies and data, and works with semantic web technologies. You can find details on our current and previous projects on the team's web pages http://www.ebi.ac.uk/fgpt/