| Folsomia candida (Collembola) is a standard test organism in terrestrial ecotoxicology. To transform this species into an eco(toxico)genomic model organism, we started a sequencing project and constructed a web-accessible database (http://www.collembase.org). Currently, Collembase holds information on ~8842 Expressed Sequence Tags. The sequence data maintained in Collembase was used for the construction of an (Agilent) microarray for soil quality testing. However, it seems obvious that this freely accessible repository is of value to other research fields as well. We foresee applicability of the database and its accompanying microarray in several research fields, for example: molecular ecology, population genetics, phylogenetics, ecogenomics, ecophysiology. This project is part of the "Assessing the living soil: an ecogenomics approach to sustainable life-support functions" project. |
