Unified display of Arabidopsis thaliana physical maps from AtDB, the A.thaliana database

In the past several years, there has been a tremendous effort to construct physical maps and to sequence the genome of Arabidopsis thaliana. As a resu lt, four of the five chromosomes are completely covered by overlapping clon es except at the centromeric and nucleolus organizer regions (MOR). In addi tion, over 30% of the genome has been sequenced and completion is anticipat ed by the end of the year 2000, Despite these accomplishments, the physical maps are provided in many formats on laboratories' Web sites. These data a re thus difficult to obtain in a coherent manner for researchers. To allevi ate this problem, AtDB (Arabidopsis thaliana DataBase, URL:http://genome-ww w. stanford.edu/Arabidopsis/) has constructed a unified display of the phys ical maps where all publiciy available physical-map data for all chromosome s are presented through the Web in a clickable, 'on-the-fly' graphic, creat ed by CGI programs that directly consult our relational database.