Open Regulatory Annotation Database
The Open Regulatory Annotation Database (also known as ORegAnno) is designed to promote community-based curation of regulatory information. Specifically, the database contains information about regulatory regions, transcription factor binding sites, regulatory variants, and haplotypes. Overview. Data Management. For each entry, cross-references are maintained to EnsEMBL, dbSNP, Entrez Gene, the NCBI Taxonomy database and PubMed. The information within ORegAnno is regularly mapped and provided as a UCSC Genome Browser track. Furthermore, each entry is associated with its experimental evidence, embedded as an Evidence Ontology within ORegAnno. This allows the researcher to analyze regulatory data using  their own conditions as to the suitability of the supporting evidence. Software and data access. The project is open source - all data and all software that is produced in the project can be freely accessed and used. Database contents. As of December 20, 2006, ORegAnno contained 4220 regulatory sequences (excluding deprecated records) for 2190 transcription factor binding sites, 1853 regulatory regions (enhancers, promoters, etc.), 170 regulatory polymorphisms, and 7 regulatory haplotypes for 17 different organisms (predominantly Drosophila melanogaster, Homo sapiens, Mus musculus, Caenorhabditis elegans, and Rattus norvegicus in that order). These records were obtained by manual curation of 828 publications  by 45 ORegAnno users from the gene regulation community. The ORegAnno publication queue contained 4215 publications of which 858 were closed, 34 were in progress (open status), and 3321 were awaiting annotation (pending status). ORegAnno is continually updated and therefore current database contents should be obtained from www.oreganno.org. RegCreative Jamboree 2006. The RegCreative jamboree was stimulated by a community initiative to curate in perpetuity the genomic sequences which have been experimentally determined to control gene expression. This objective is of fundamental importance to evolutionary analysis and translational research as regulatory mechanisms are widely implicated in species-specific adaptation and the  etiology of disease. This initiative culminated in the formation of an international consortium of like-minded scientists dedicated to accomplishing this task. The RegCreative jamboree was the first opportunity for these groups to meet to be able to accurately assess the current state of knowledge in gene regulation and to begin to develop standards by which to curate regulatory information. In total, 44 researchers attended the workshop from 9 different countries and 23 institutions. Funding was also obtained from ENFIN, the BioSapiens Network, FWO Research Foundation, Genome Canada and Genome British Columbia. The specific outcomes of the RegCreative meeting to  date are: