Commentary
Crowdsourcing genomic analyses of ash and ash dieback – power to the people
1 The Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich Research Park, Norwich NR4 7UH, UK
2 The John Innes Centre, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, NR4 7UH, UK
3 The Genome Analysis Centre, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, NR4 7UH, UK
4 Bioinformatics Support Unit, Faculty of Medical Sciences, Framlington Place, Newcastle University, Newcastle, NE2 4HH, UK
5 Agriculture and Agri-food Canada, 1391 Sandford St, London, ON, N5V 4T3, Canada
GigaScience 2013, 2:2 doi:10.1186/2047-217X-2-2
Published: 12 February 2013Abstract
Ash dieback is a devastating fungal disease of ash trees that has swept across Europe and recently reached the UK. This emergent pathogen has received little study in the past and its effect threatens to overwhelm the ash population. In response to this we have produced some initial genomics datasets and taken the unusual step of releasing them to the scientific community for analysis without first performing our own. In this manner we hope to ‘crowdsource’ analyses and bring the expertise of the community to bear on this problem as quickly as possible. Our data has been released through our website at oadb.tsl.ac.uk and a public GitHub repository.
