WormBase (http://www.wormbase.org/), the model organism database for information about Caenorhabditis elegans and related nematodes, continues to expand in breadth and depth. Over the past year, WormBase has added multiple large-scale datasets including SAGE, interactome, promoterome, 3-D protein structure datasets, systematic GFP expression patterns, microarray results, and NCBI KOGs in addition to an extensive intellectual lineage of the C. elegans research community.

Systematic literature curation continues to provide highly refined annotations of gene function, now including such information as genetic interaction and regulation results. Manually curated datasets culled from the literature now include reagents such as antibodies and transgenes.

To accommodate this growth, the International WormBase Consortium has improved the user interface by adding new features to aid in navigation, visualization of large-scale data sets, advanced searching, and an implementation of the BioMart data mining framework. To facilitate bioinformatic analyses, we generate periodic freezes of the database and have established an open-access data mining server.

Internally we have restructured the database models to rationalize the representation of genes and to prepare the system to accommodate the genome sequences of three additional Caenorhabditis species over the coming year.