A collaboration has been set up between the U.S. (James Reecy, NRSP-8 Animal Trait Ontology Project) and Europe (Hein van der Steen, ATO coordinator, EADGENE and SABRE) with the objective of developing a unified animal trait ontology (ATO). A unitified ATO will help facilitate the transfer of trait and genomics information across agricultural species and the links with information from human and from model species such as mouse and rat. Our target is to make (as much as possible) good use of all activities worldwide that are related to the development of (components of) an ATO.

How to Get Involved:

If you are knowledgeable about a particular set of traits that should be included in the ATO and/or are interested in participating in the development of the animal trait ontology and/or are working on an aspect of an ATO for a certain species, please contact Hein van der Steen (hein.vandersteen@stonebridgeg.com) and/or James Reecy (jreecy@iastate.edu).  

The initial focus will be on Cattle, Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Horses, Shrimp and Salmonites but initiatives in other species can easily be included. General information about the ATO can also be found at http://www.animalgenome.org/bioinfo/projects/ATO/. A first version of an ATO for pigs, cattle and poultry has been developed. For details see http://kh06043001-ans.ansci.iastate.edu/~laron/amigo/cgi-bin/go.cgi.

What is an ATO?

An ATO is a standard way of trait description across species. The goal is to set up an ontology which will fulfil the needs of research as well as industry.

• To improve ontology relevant for host-pathogen interactions and immunology
• To bridge the ‘language gap’ between animal genomics and breeding industry terminology
• To share, compare and use information within and across species
• To link health and production related findings at the molecular and physiological level to relevant breeding terms in an automated way.

The ontology consists of:

• A dictionary (Fig. 1) explaining terms
• A thesaurus (Fig. 2) explaining and linking phenotypes within and across species. 

Figure 1:  ATO dictionary	Figure 2: ATO Thesaurus

• Develop ATO tool (Pig, Cattle, Chicken, Horse, Sheep, Salmon, Shrimp)
• Involve Animal Industry and Research Groups
• Integrate with other databases (Human, Rat and Mouse)
• Refine the COB (Collaborative Ontology Building) editor
• Develop ontology query tools
• Link information across databases