Creation and unification of development and life stage ontologies for animals

TL;DR

This paper introduces development and life stage ontologies for 21 animal species, unifies them into a multi-species ontology, and demonstrates their use in integrating transcriptomics data across 52 species.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive collection of ontologies for development and life stages and their integration into a unified multi-species framework.

Findings

Enabled cross-species comparison of transcriptomics data

Facilitated better annotation of animal data

Supported comparative biology research

Abstract

With the new era of genomics, an increasing number of animal species are amenable to large-scale data generation. This had led to the emergence of new multi-species ontologies to annotate and organize these data. While anatomy and cell types are well covered by these efforts, information regarding development and life stages is also critical in the annotation of animal data. Its lack can hamper our ability to answer comparative biology questions and to interpret functional results. We present here a collection of development and life stage ontologies for 21 animal species, and their merge into a common multi-species ontology. This work has allowed the integration and comparison of transcriptomics data in 52 animal species.