近日，中国科学院北京基因组研究所章张研究员课题组与北京理工大学、中国林业科学研究院及华中农业大学合作开发完成RiceWiki数据库。该数据库是基于维基百科的水稻基因信息平台，是可编辑且内容公开的公众注释系统。研究成果在Nucleic Acids Research杂志发表。
水稻是人类重要的粮食作物之一，同时也是研究农作物及其他相关植物的重要模式生物。因此，水稻成为第一个全基因组测序的农作物。随着水稻基因组学和转录组学研究的深入，先后出现了BGI-RIS，TIGR，RAP-DB和RGKbase等专业数据库。这些数据库多是依赖专业人员的编辑更新，不仅费时费力，而且成本也逐渐增加，导致其更新速度远远落后于水稻数据的指数增长。RiceWiki数据库的优势在于汇集整个水稻研究领域的科研人员的智慧和力量，共同完善水稻基因的相关信息和数据更新，以期构建一部水稻基因的百科全书。
目前，RiceWiki已经整合了两个水稻栽培亚种的基因数据（O. sativa indica 93–11 和 O. sativa japonica Nipponbare），涵盖66000多个水稻基因的相关信息。水稻基因的原始资料主要来源于RefSeq （NCBI），Ensembl，RAP-DB和MSU Rice Genome Annotation Project。每个水稻基因的资料由注释信息、研究该基因的相关实验室以及参考文献和结构信息构成。
为了解决着作权的问题，RiceWiki还引入了作者奖励机制（AuthorReward），不仅可以评价基因注释信息的质量，还可以提高相关领域科研人员的参与度。RiceWiki允许注册用户随时创造，更新和修改水稻基因信息，明显的简化了资料收集，分析和整理的过程，以适应生物学数据的爆炸式增长模式。(生物谷Bioon.com)
生物谷推荐的英文摘要
Nucleic Acids Research doi: 10.1093/nar/gkt926
RiceWiki: a wiki-based database for community curation of rice genes
Zhang Zhang, Jian Sang, Lina Ma, Gang Wu, Hao Wu, Dawei Huang, Dong Zou, Siqi Liu, Ang Li, Lili Hao, Ming Tian, Chao Xu, Xumin Wang, Jiayan Wu, Jingfa Xiao, Lin Dai, Ling-Ling Chen, Songnian Hu and Jun Yu
Rice is the most important staple food for a large part of the world’s human population and also a key model organism for biological studies of crops as well as other related plants. Here we present RiceWiki (http://ricewiki.big.ac.cn), a wiki-based, publicly editable and open-content platform for community curation of rice genes. Most existing related biological databases are based on expert curation; with the exponentially exploding volume of rice knowledge and other relevant data, however, expert curation becomes increasingly laborious and time-consuming to keep knowledge up-to-date, accurate and comprehensive, struggling with the flood of data and requiring a large number of people getting involved in rice knowledge curation. Unlike extant relevant databases, RiceWiki features harnessing collective intelligence in community curation of rice genes, quantifying users' contributions in each curated gene and providing explicit authorship for each contributor in any given gene, with the aim to exploit the full potential of the scientific community for rice knowledge curation. Based on community curation, RiceWiki bears the potential to make it possible to build a rice encyclopedia by and for the scientific community that harnesses community intelligence for collaborative knowledge curation, covers all aspects of biological knowledge and keeps evolving with novel knowledge.
