AMIS, The Article Minimum Information Standard

The curation process is significantly slowed down by missing information in the articles analyzed (for example, the identity of the clones used to generate ISH probes, the precise sequences tested in reporter assays, etc..). To help authors ensure in the future that necessary information is present in their article, we defined the Article Minimum Information Standard (AMIS) guidelines. This standard describes for each experiment the mandatory information that should be mentioned in literature articles to facilitate the curation process. These guidelines extend the minimal information defined by the MISFISHIE format (Deutsch at al. 2008, _Nature Biotechnology_). This standard was deduced from the ANISEED curation pipeline (Tassy, Dauga, Daian, Sobral et al. 2010, _Genome Research_). ANISEED is a generic infrastructure for the creation, maintenance and integration of molecular and anatomical information on ascidians.

Thanks to the ANISEED curation pipeline, the capture of published information was streamlined by the creation of the “Article Card” concept. Each Article Card summarizes in a standardized and structured format the content of the text and figures of an article. It lists, and links to the corresponding experimental evidences, all features studied (genes, cell fates, etc...). This curation strategy allowed pointing out missing information essential to transform the “biological interpretability” of the data into their “computability”. AMIS was defined to obviate this problem.

The MISFISHIE format doesn’t include the minimal information necessary to describe cis-regulatory elements. In ANISEED, a sophisticated representation of the structure of cis-regulatory elements and their upstream regulators was designed. AMIS details the minimal information to describe a regulatory region. To facilitate regulatory region data transfer between databases, a document type definition (DTD) was developed, following the AMIS rules

Curation of NISEED, an integrative framework for the digital representation of embryonic development

NISEED (Network for In situ Expression and Embryological Data) is a generic infrastructure for the creation, maintenance and integration of molecular and anatomical information on model organisms. We applied it to ascidians which are marine invertebrate chordates. These animals constitute model organisms of choice for developmental biology because their embryos develop with a small number of cells and an invariant lineage, allowing their study with a cellular level of resolution. In ANISEED (Ascidian NISEED), embryogenesis of ascidian is represented at the level of the genome via functional gene annotations, cis-regulatory elements or gene expression data, at the level of the cell by representing its morphology, fates, lineage, and relations with its neighbors, or at the level of the whole embryo by representing its anatomy and morphogenesis at successive developmental stages. The system provides also tool and standard to enter, annotate, curate and manage data. All results can be accessed through the ANISEED website at "http://aniseed-ibdm.univ-mrs.fr":http://aniseed-ibdm.univ-mrs.fr
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Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

The ontology of the anatomy and development of the solitary ascidian Ciona: the swimming larva and its metamorphosis

Ciona robusta (Ciona intestinalis type A), a model organism for biological studies, belongs to ascidians, the main class of tunicates, which are the closest relatives of vertebrates. In Ciona, a project on the ontology of both development and anatomy is ongoing for several years. Its goal is to standardize a resource relating each anatomical structure to developmental stages. Today, the ontology is codified until the hatching larva stage. Here, we present its extension throughout the swimming larva stages, the metamorphosis, until the juvenile stages. For standardizing the developmental ontology, we acquired different time-lapse movies, confocal microscope images and histological serial section images for each developmental event from the hatching larva stage (17.5h post fertilization) to the juvenile stage (7days post fertilization). Combining these data, we defined 12 new distinct developmental stages (from Stage 26 to Stage 37), in addition to the previously defined 26 stages, referred to embryonic development. The new stages were grouped into four Periods named: Adhesion, Tail Absorption, Body Axis Rotation, and Juvenile. To build the anatomical ontology, 203 anatomical entities were identified, defined according to the literature, and annotated, taking advantage from the high resolution and the complementary information obtained from confocal microscopy and histology. The ontology describes the anatomical entities in hierarchical levels, from the cell level (cell lineage) to the tissue/organ level. Comparing the number of entities during development, we found two rounds on entity increase: in addition to the one occurring after fertilization, there is a second one during the Body Axis Rotation Period, when juvenile structures appear. Vice versa, one-third of anatomical entities associated with the embryo/larval life were significantly reduced at the beginning of metamorphosis. Data was finally integrated within the web-based resource "TunicAnatO", which includes a number of anatomical images and a dictionary with synonyms. This ontology will allow the standardization of data underpinning an accurate annotation of gene expression and the comprehension of mechanisms of differentiation. It will help in understanding the emergence of elaborated structures during both embryogenesis and metamorphosis, shedding light on tissue degeneration and differentiation occurring at metamorphosis

Creating 3D Digital Replicas of Ascidian Embryos from Stacks of Confocal Images

During embryonic development, cell behaviors that are tightly coordinated both spatially and temporally integrate at the tissue level and drive embryonic morphogenesis. Over the past 20 years, advances in imaging techniques, in particular, the development of confocal imaging, have opened a new world in biology, not only giving us access to a wealth of information, but also creating new challenges. It is sometimes difficult to make the best use of the recordings of the complex, inherently three-dimensional (3D) processes we now can observe. In particular, these data are often not directly suitable for even simple but conceptually fundamental quantifications. This article describes a process whereby image stacks gathered from live or fixed ascidian embryos are digitalized and segmented to produce 3D embryo replicas. These replicas can then be interfaced via a 3D Virtual Embryo module to a model organism database (Aniseed) that allows one to relate the geometrical properties of cells and cell contacts to additional parameters such as cell lineage, cell fates, or the underlying genetic program. Such an integrated system can serve several general purposes. First, it makes it possible to quantify and better understand the dynamics of cell behaviors during embryonic development, including, for instance, the automatic detection of asymmetric cell divisions or the evolution of cell contacts. Second, the 3D Virtual Embryo software proposes a panel of mathematical shape descriptors to precisely quantify cellular geometries and generate a 3D identity card for each embryonic cell. Such reconstructions open the door to a detailed 3D simulation of morphogenesis

Time-Lapse Imaging of Live Phallusia Embryos for Creating 3D Digital Replicas.

International audienceDuring embryonic development, cell behaviors that are tightly coordinated both spatially and temporally integrate at the tissue level and drive embryonic morphogenesis. Over the past 20 years, advances in imaging techniques, in particular, the development of confocal imaging, have opened a new world in biology, not only giving us access to a wealth of information, but also creating new challenges. It is sometimes difficult to make the best use of the recordings of the complex, inherently three-dimensional (3D) processes we now can observe. In particular, these data are often not directly suitable for even simple but conceptually fundamental quantifications. This article provides a method to fluorescently label and image structures of interest that will subsequently be reconstructed, such as cell membranes or nuclei. The protocol describes live imaging of Phallusia mammillata embryos, which are robust, colorless, and optically transparent with negligible autofluorescence. Their diameter ranges from 100 µm to 120 µm, which allows time-lapse microscopy of whole embryos using two-photon microscopy with a high-resolution objective. Although two-photon imaging is described in detail, any imaging technology that results in a z -stack may be used. The resulting image stacks can subsequently be digitalized and segmented to produce 3D embryo replicas that can be interfaced to a model organism database and used to quantify cell shapes

Imaging of Fixed Ciona Embryos for Creating 3D Digital Replicas

During embryonic development, cell behaviors that are tightly coordinated both spatially and temporally integrate at the tissue level and drive embryonic morphogenesis. Over the past 20 years, advances in imaging techniques, in particular, the development of confocal imaging, have opened a new world in biology, not only giving us access to a wealth of information, but also creating new challenges. It is sometimes difficult to make the best use of the recordings of the complex, inherently three-dimensional (3D) processes we now can observe. In particular, these data are often not directly suitable for even simple but conceptually fundamental quantifications. This article presents a method for imaging embryonic development with cellular resolution in fixed ascidian embryos. A large fraction of the ascidian community primarily studies the development of the cosmopolitan ascidian Ciona intestinalis . Because the embryos of this species are insufficiently transparent and show significant autofluorescence, live imaging is difficult. Thus, whole embryos are fixed and optically cleared. They are then stained and imaged on a regular or two-photon confocal microscope. The resulting image stacks can subsequently be digitalized and segmented to produce 3D embryo replicas that can be interfaced to a model organism database and used to quantify cell shapes

The workflow adopted to build BODA.

<p><b>A.</b> Schemes illustrating the workflow adopted to build BODA requiring strict collaboration between experts in <i>B. schlosseri</i> biology and biocurators. <b>B.</b> An Excel page and its corresponding display on OBO-edit. In the latter, you can see different visualization of the relationship “tunic is part of colony” (left panel of the OBO-Edit display); the definition and references of the term “tunic” are in the right panel (where you can also find synonyms, comments, etc, where introduced).</p