Dr ALAYNE CUZICK

BIOGRAPHY

Alayne is a biocurator for the multi-species pathogen-host interactions database (PHI-base) available at http://www.PHI-base.org . PHI-base contains manually curated information on microbial genes important for virulence (diseases formation). Each PHI-base entry is annotated with a high-level disease outcome phenotype. Data is provided to the European Bioinformatics Institute (via the PhytoPath project (http://www.phytopathdb.org)) and to FungiDB (http://fungidb.org). PHI-base is a resource provider to ELIXIR UK (http://www.elixir-uk.org).

Prior to joining the PHI-base team, Alayne undertook several laboratory-based research projects within both the agricultural and medical fields. She has worked on various pathogen-host interactions including Hyaloperonospora arabidopsidis-Arabidopsis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa-cultured human lung epithelial cells and Fusarium-Arabidopsis. This practical experience has proven invaluable for her more recent transition to the biocuration of published pathogen-host interaction experiments for PHI-base.

Alayne is helping to develop an author curation tool, PHI-Canto, to enable authors to curate their own data into PHI-base. Controlled language (ontologies) are being developed for authors to select an accurate term to describe their disease phenotype and experimental conditions. In the future, this will enable both people and computers to access this open data for maximum interoperability. Alayne’s research is being undertaken in collaboration with the PomBase team based at the University of Cambridge (https://www.pombase.org/).