The Mouse Genome Database: integration of and access to knowledge about the laboratory mouse

The Mouse Genome Database (MGD) (http://www.informatics.jax.org) is the community model organism database resource for the laboratory mouse, a premier animal model for the study of genetic and genomic systems relevant to human biology and disease. MGD maintains a comprehensive catalog of genes, functional RNAs and other genome features as well as heritable phenotypes and quantitative trait loci. The genome feature catalog is generated by the integration of computational and manual genome annotations generated by NCBI, Ensembl and Vega/HAVANA. MGD curates and maintains the comprehensive listing of functional annotations for mouse genes using the Gene Ontology, and MGD curates and integrates comprehensive phenotype annotations including associations of mouse models with human diseases. Recent improvements include integration of the latest mouse genome build (GRCm38), improved access to comparative and functional annotations for mouse genes with expanded representation of comparative vertebrate genomes and new loads of phenotype data from high-throughput phenotyping projects. All MGD resources are freely available to the research community.