New species of rhabditid nematodes are being discovered at an increasing rate. In Caenorhabditis alone, more species have been discovered in the last decade than in the previous 100 years since C. elegans was described. Although this discovery provides more candidate species for comparative biology and genomics, it poses a challenge for taxonomists and for keeping track of comparative data. In response to this challenge, we have created RhabditinaDB, a curated, online, open-access database to provide information on all known rhabditid nematodes, including data on taxonomy, phylogeny, distribution, living and non-living resources such as strains and type specimens, images (including DIC stacks, electron micrographs, and camera lucida drawings), species descriptions and relevant literature, phenotypic character data and molecular sequences. Additionally, we have implemented tools for querying the data, such as keyword searching, BLAST, PhenoBLAST (modified from Gunsalus et al., 2004) and a species-comparison page. Currently, the database shows information for all known species in genus Caenorhabditis, but will be expanded in the coming years to show data for all rhabditid species. Some problems in rhabditid systematics have arisen from the difficulty of obtaining taxonomic materials, lack of good keys or ways to compare new species to those already described. Specifically, there has been a high rate of synonymous descriptions and the accumulation of newly discovered but undocumented species. Our database should mitigate these problems by providing as much data as possible via one resource, along with a recent taxonomy (Sudhaus 2011), based primarily on our molecular phylogeny (Kiontke et al., 2007, 2012). Not only will RhabditinaDB facilitate taxonomy, but it will also provide data on rhabditid biodiversity. This in turn should facilitate phylogenetically informed taxon choices for comparative studies and genomics. As RhabditinaDB is a work in progress, we welcome suggestions for improvements, and data submissions. RhabditinaDB can be accessed at:
http://wormtails.bio.nyu.edu/Databases . Thanks to M. Katari, J. Lorenzana, NYU Bobst Library, W. Sudhaus. References: Gunsalus et al. 2004, Nucl. Acids Res. 32:D406-D410; Sudhaus 2011, J. Nematode Morphol. Syst. 14(2):113-178; Kiontke et al. 2007, Curr. Biology 17(22):1925-1937.