BMC Genomics Proceedings BioMed Central Open Access Development of a database system for mapping insertional mutations onto the mouse genome with large-scale experimental data †1,2 †2 †3 Wenwei Yang , Ke Jin , Xing Xie 3 3 2,5 1,2 Li Wang , Ning Gu , Yang Zhong 3 4 , Dongsheng Li , Jigang Yang , and Ling V Sun* Addresses: 1Institute of Developmental Biology and Molecular Medicine, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, PR China, 2School of Life Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, PR China, 3School of Computer Science, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, PR China, 4School of Information Technology, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, Jiangsu 214122, PR China and 5Shanghai Center for Bioinformation Technology, Shanghai 200235, PR China E-mail: Wenwei Yang - wenwei_yang@fudan.edu.cn; Ke Jin - jinke@fudan.edu.cn; Xing Xie - xingxie@fudan.edu.cn; Dongsheng Li - dongshengli@fudan.edu.cn; Jigang Yang - yangjigang001@hotmail.com; Li Wang - wangli@fudan.edu.cn; Ning Gu - ninggu@fudan.edu.cn; Yang Zhong - yangzhong@fudan.edu.cn; Ling V Sun* - lingsun@fudan.edu.cn *Corresponding author †Equal contributors from Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet) Eighth International Conference on Bioinformatics (InCoB2009) Singapore 7-11 September 2009 Published: 3 December 2009 BMC Genomics 2009, 10(Suppl 3):S7 doi: 10.1186/1471-2164-10-S3-S7 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/10/S3/S7 © 2009 Yang et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Insertional mutagenesis is an effective method for functional genomic studies in various organisms. It can rapidly generate easily tractable mutations. A large-scale insertional mutagenesis with the piggyBac (PB) transposon is currently performed in mice at the Institute of Developmental Biology and Molecular Medicine (IDM), Fudan University in Shanghai, China. This project is carried out via collaborations among multiple groups overseeing interconnected experimental steps and generates a large volume of experimental data continuously. Therefore, the project calls for an efficient database system for recording, management, statistical analysis, and information exchange. Results: This paper presents a database application called MP-PBmice (insertional mutation mapping system of PB Mutagenesis Information Center), which is developed to serve the on-going large-scale PB insertional mutagenesis project. A lightweight enterprise-level development framework Struts-Spring- Hibernate is used here to ensure constructive and flexible support to the application. The MP-PBmice database system has three major features: strict access-control, efficient workflow control, and good expandability. It supports the collaboration among different groups that enter data and exchange information on daily basis, and is capable of providing real time progress reports for the whole project. MP-PBmice can be easily adapted for other large-scale insertional mutation mapping projects and the source code of this software is freely available at http://www.idmshanghai.cn/PBmice. Page 1 of 13 (page number not for citation purposes)