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Welcome to BeeBase

BeeBase is a comprehensive sequence data source for the bee research community. It currently hosts the genomes of Apis mellifera and three of its pathogens, as well as Bombus terrestris and B. impatiens; the genomes of two additional species, Apis dorsata and A. florea are currently under analysis and will soon be incorporated. BeeBase is built on version 4.5 of the A. mellifera genome assembly, version 1.0 of the B. terrestris and version 2.0 of the B. impatiens assemblies, released by The Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Sequencing Center in 2011.

A recent genome sequence improvement effort implemented Next Generation Sequencing technologies to significantly increase sequence coverage of the A. mellifera genome, producing assembly 4.5. The Honey Bee Genome Sequencing Consortium is currently finishing annotation analysis to release the newest Official Gene Set (OGS) for this species.

From molecule to colony: Honey bee is a model species for social behavior and an essential species to global ecology as pollinators. Reports from the Honey Bee Genome Sequencing Consortium were our first genome-wide insights into the social life of insects. An informatics resource like BeeBase opens the possibility for further exploration to find answers to how such life style came to be amongst many other questions.

 

Data Usage Policy:
Genomes and predicted gene sets for the following species are not yet published: Bombus terrestris, B. impatiens, Apis florea, A. dorsata, and A. mellifera (latest assembly Amel_4.5).These sequences are provided to the public pre-publication to allow research on individual genes to proceed faster than the genome analysis would allow.  They are covered by the Ft. Lauderdale (1) and later Toronto (2) agreements whereby the data producers make the data available and state their intent to publish analyses, the data users ask permission to use the prepublication data and cite the appropriate source, and the journals and reviewers make sure that articles are published following the guidelines.  Release to GenBank and Ensembl and similar repositories does not constitute publication. Please contact us if you wish to use these sequences in published analyses.
References:
1. Sharing Data from Large-scale Biological Research Projects: A System of Tripartite Responsibility. Report of a meeting organised by the Wellcome Trust and held on 14-15 January 2003 at Fort Lauderdale, USA.
2. Toronto International Data Release Workshop Authors. Prepublication data sharing. Nature. 2009 Sep 10;461(7261):168-70.
 
How to Cite:
Please cite the use of BeeBase as: Hymenoptera Genome Database: integrated community resources for insect species of the order Hymenoptera. Munoz-Torres MC, Reese JT, Childers CP, Bennett AK, Sundaram JP, Childs KL, Anzola JM, Milshina N, Elsik CG. Nucleic Acids Research (2011) 39(suppl 1): D658-D662 doi: 10.1093/nar/gkq1145