Xenbase is a model organism database, providing informatics resources, genomic and biological data on the frogs, Xenopus laevis and Xenopus tropicalis.[1]
The Xenopus model organism is responsible for large amounts of new knowledge on embryonic development and cell biology. Xenopus has a number of unique experimental advantages as a vertebrate model. Paramount among these is the robustness of early embryos and their amenability to microinjection and microsurgery. This makes them a particularly attractive system for testing the ectopic activity of gene products and loss-of-function experiments using antagonizing reagents such as morpholinos, dominant-negatives and neomorphic proteins. Morpholinos are synthetic oligonucleotides that can be used to inhibit nuclear RNA splicing or mRNA translation and are the common gene inhibition reagent in Xenopus as neither siRNA or miRNA have yet been shown to reproducibly function in frog embryos. Xenopus embryos develop very quickly and form a full set of differentiated tissues within days of fertilization, allowing rapid analysis of the effects of manipulating embryonic gene expression.[2] The large size of embryos and amenability to microinjection also makes them extremely well suited to microarray approaches. The site also provides a large database of images illustrating the full genome, and several movies detailing embryogenesis.