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 result, four of the five chromosomes are completely covered by overlapping clones except at the centromeric and nucleolus organizer regions (NOR). In addition, over 30% of the genome has been sequenced and completion is anticipated by the end of the year 2000. Despite these accomplishments, the physical maps are provided in many formats on laboratories' Web sites. These data are thus difficult to obtain in a coherent manner for researchers. To alleviate this problem, AtDB (Arabidopsis thaliana DataBase, URL: http://genome-www.stanford.edu/Arabidopsis/) has constructed a unified display of the physical maps where all publicly available physical-map data for all chromosomes are presented through the Web in a clickable, 'on-the-fly' graphic, created by CGI programs that directly consult our relational database.