Ontology of Mouse Developmental Anatomy

"The ontology of mouse developmental anatomy was originally developed by Jonathan Bard and his colleagues as part of the Edinburgh Mouse Atlas Project (EMAP) (http://www.emouseatlas.org) in order to provide a structured controlled vocabulary of stage-specific anatomical structures for the developing laboratory mouse.

The developmental mouse anatomy ontology has subsequently been substantially extended and refined in a collaborative effort between EMAP and the Gene Expression Database (GXD) project, part of the Mouse Genome Informatics (MGI) resource at The Jackson Laboratory. Both GXD and the Edinburgh Mouse Atlas of Gene Expression (EMAGE) database project currently use this anatomy ontology to describe patterns of gene expression in the mouse embryo.

Previous versions, such as the one posted on the OBO Foundry site under the filename EMAP.obo, listed the anatomical entities for each developmental stage (Theiler Stages 1 through 26) separately. Stage-specific instances were presented as uniparental hierarchical trees organized using part-of relationships only (i.e. as a strict partonomy). These hierarchies have been used for annotation of expression in both the EMAGE and GXD databases, and the associated identifiers for the stage-specific instances are preserved."