View source for PHI-base- The Pathogen Host database

Summary Correspondence by email: Alistair Irvine to Ramona Walls:
Dr. Alistair Irvine, Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Rothamsted Research, Harpenden

* Pathogen-Host Interaction Database (PHI-base, http://www.phi-base.org/) which annotates pathogen genes based on known interactions with host organisms.  
* More information: Nucleic Acids Research http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/43/D1/D645.full.pdf.
* Interested in using ontologies to describing diseases in their database: Walls, R., et al. (2012). A plant disease extension of the Infectious Disease Ontology. International Conference on Biomedical Ontology 2012. Graz, Austria. 897: 1-5.
* Currently, curation of diseases in PHI-base is performed through a simple free text field. This causes predicable problems, as can be since from the list of unique disease names that I extracted from  our database and have attached to this email.

In your 2012 paper, you mention that researchers should contact you before using IDOPlant, because it was still under development. I wish to enquire about the current status of this project and if the plant disease terms would be sufficient to describe the diseases in our database (attached).

* Downloaded the latest available Plant Disease Ontology OBO file from http://palea.cgrb.oregonstate.edu/viewsvn/Poc/trunk/ontology/collaborators_ontology/plant_disease/plant_disease_ontology.obo?view=log, but when I attempted to find diseases from our database I was not successful.

In addition to the disease, we do capture data regarding pathogen species, host species, infected tissue, inducers, anti-infective agent and more. Given the methodology in your paper, we could use this information to define the disease.