Modelisation and representation of expression data in Ascidians: The virtual ascidian embryo project

Ascidians are marine invertebrate chordates, which display a larval body plan similar to that of vertebrates. Their embryos are composed of a small number of cells and develop with an invariant cell lineage. In addition, genomes for two species are available [1]. These characteristics make this system a unique opportunity to understand the developmental strategies of a chordate at the embryological, genetic and molecular level. While more and more data become available for this model, the need of an informatics system able to correlate different kind of information with an efficient knowledge representation system becomes essential. The ANISEED (Ascidian Network for In Situ Expression and Embryological Data) system has been designed to offer an advanced database able to relate expression data with other knowledge fields such as lineage, induction, cell fates, genomic information, or blastomere position and morphology in the developing embryo. Data can be accessed through a web portal, but ANISEED also provides a virtual 3D embryo to display the information in an interactive manner.