Research

A platform named RiceWiki has been developed recently by Professor ZHANG Zhang and his team at Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, associated with research partners at Huazhong Agricultural University, Beijing Institute of Technology, and Chinese Academy of Forestry. 

Rice (Oryza sativa) is not only the most important staple food feeding a large part of the world population, but also an important model organism for biological studies of crops as well as other related plants. For this reason, rice was chosen as the first crop for whole genome sequencing. With the development of studies on rice genome and transcriptome, multiple databases have been developed, such as BGI-RIS, TIGR, RAP-DB and RGKbase etc.  

RiceWiki is a wiki-based, publicly editable and open-content platform for community curation of rice genes. Most of the existing rice databases are based on expert curation, which becomes increasingly laborious and time-consuming to keep knowledge up-to-date, accurate and comprehensive, struggling with the flood of data and requiring a large number of people getting involved in rice knowledge curation. Unlike extant relevant databases, RiceWiki features harnessing collective intelligence in community curation of rice genes, quantifying users’ contributions in each curated gene and providing explicit authorship for each contributor in any given gene, with the aim to build a rice encyclopedia by and for the scientific community. 

RiceWiki now incorporates two common cultivated rice subspecies (O. sativa indica 93–11 and O. sativa japonica Nipponbare) and covers over 66 000 rice genes. The gene information in RiceWiki was initially seeded from NCBI RefSeq, Ensembl, RAP-DB and MSU Rice Genome Annotation Project.  

The content of every gene in RiceWiki is structured into multiple sections, namely ‘Annotated Information’, ’Structured Information’, ‘Labs Working on This Gene’ and ‘References’, as well as a one-sentence summary for gene description at the top of each page.  

To attract more participation from the scientific community for RiceWiki and to make it a vivid platform for community curation of rice genes, RiceWiki installed ‘AuthorReward’, an extension to MediaWiki, which provides a standard practice to reward community provided contents in bio-wikis by quantifying researchers’ contributions and providing explicit authorship according to their quantitative contributions.