The GDB Human Genome Database was a community curated collection of human

genomic Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes as well as its hierarchical, three-dim ...

data. It was a key database in the

Human Genome Project The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the base pairs that make up human DNA, and of identifying, mapping and sequencing all of the genes of the human genome from both a ...

and was in service from 1989 to 2008.

History

In 1989 the

Howard Hughes Medical Institute The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical research organization based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, engineer, fil ...

provided funding to establish a central repository for human

genetic map Genetic linkage is the tendency of DNA sequences that are close together on a chromosome to be inherited together during the meiosis phase of sexual reproduction. Two genetic markers that are physically near to each other are unlikely to be separ ...

ping data. This project ultimately resulted in the creation of the GDB Human Genome DataBase in September 1990. In order to ensure a high degree of quality, records within GDB were subjected to a curation process by human genetics specialists, including the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee. Established under the leadership of Peter Pearson and Dick Lucier, GDB received financial support from the

US Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United State ...

and the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

. Located at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, GDB became a source of high quality mapping data which were made available both online as well as through numerous printed publications. The project was supported internationally by the EU, Japan, and other countries. The GDB had several directors in its time. Peter Pearson, David T. Kingsbury, Stantley Letovsky, Peter Li, and

A. Jamie Cuticchia Anthony James Cuticchia Jr. (December 28, 1966 – January 6, 2022) was an American scientist with expertise in the fields of genetics, bioinformatics, and genomics. In particular, he was responsible for the collection of the data constituting ...

. Funds from the US Department of Energy that were previously allocated for GDB were transferred in 1998 due to the shift in emphasis in the human genome project. However that same year,

obtained funding from Canadian public and private sources to continue the operations of GDB. While the data curation continued to be performed at Johns Hopkins, GDB central operations were moved to The Hospital for Sick Children (HSC) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In November 2001, the HSC fired Cuticchia due to a dispute over the GDB website domain name. In 2003 RTI International became the new host for GDB where it continued to be maintained as a public resource; GDB was closed in 2008 after control of the project reverted to Johns Hopkins.

References

External links

*https://web.archive.org/web/19970605132915/http://www.gdb.org/ archived version of the GDB website (1997) {{DEFAULTSORT:Gdb Human Genome Database Genome databases