Manuel Lera Ramírez
My interests
I am interested in data standardisation in the context of genetic research. That means standardising genotypes (engineered DNA changes concerning a reference genome present in a strain) and phenotypes (biological consequences of that genotype that researchers characterise). This started during my PhD, when I worked with fission yeast using genetics, and continues in my work and my passion project, Genestorian, an Open Source web application to manage collection of plasmids, model organism strains and cell lines: https://www.genestorian.org/.
My work
I work in PomBase, the model organism database for fission yeast. We provide researchers with various data types that can be accessed on our website or used programmatically for bioinformatics. We offer gene sequences and features and a genome browser. Still, our most valuable data are manually curated literature annotations, including gene product function and localisation (Gene Ontology), phenotype annotations linked to underlying genotypes (Fission Yeast Phenotype Ontology), and protein sequence features and modifications.
PomBase has pioneered community curation, a process in which literature curation is performed in collaboration between authors without prior curation experience and professional curators. This renders better annotations and raises awareness among researchers about our data types. In this fellowship, I want to improve my training skills to produce videos and materials to train our users on how to use our community curation tool and get the most out of our database.
