What should a web-based E. coli MOD initiative do?
• Capture the literature and experience for the full community – ranging from new students, investigators, and those looking to extrapolate E. coli information to other systems, to core E. coli research groups, to systems biologists and bioinformaticians seeking to extract insights from this body of information. • Provide access to high throughput data and structural data and allow comparisons between results from high throughput data done in different laboratories. • Identify anomalies – disconnects that may suggest missing pathways, missing genes (particularly in intergenic regions), missing understanding of the biology. • Create the hub of an intellectual community of those using E. coli for different reasons, hastening our ability to synthesize information on this organism. • Provide an essential platform for the development of genome databases for other bacteria, both by providing a template for other organisms and by providing a scholarly, curated annotation of genes in this majo
