Meeting Abstract

P3.150  Wednesday, Jan. 6  The Feeding Experiments End-user Database (FEED) WALL, C.E.*; GAPEYEV, V.; GERMAN, R.Z.; LIU, X.; VINYARD, C.J.; WILLIAMS, S.H.; Duke Univ.; NESCent; Johns Hopkins Univ.; NESCent; NEOUCOM; Ohio Univ. cw19@duke.edu

Over the past 35 years, researchers have collected impressive datasets on motor patterns of muscles and associated movements and forces in the jaws and oropharyngeal apparatus during feeding across a wide range of mammals. Individually, the datasets demonstrate the physiological and behavioral complexity of mammalian feeding. Further understanding of the evolutionary basis of this complexity depends on inter-specific comparisons which are not possible without bringing individual datasets together in a comprehensive database. The utility of a database for synthetic research, in turn, depends on aligning the data recordings, behaviors, morphologies, and data acquisition protocols with respect to a common ontological language. Here we report on a database that will serve as a repository for experimental physiological data on mammalian feeding and efforts to develop an ontology for behavioral, morphological and physiological feeding data. The Feeding Experiments End-user Database (FEED), with development supported by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, will be a publicly available, web-based resource and the first major database of organism-level physiological data. The most common types of data are EMG, bone strain, and kinematic recordings made during chewing and swallowing. FEED will support easy upload and storage of raw data recordings and associated metadata. End-users will be able to search FEED using controlled attributes and keywords in free-text descriptions, and to download raw data recordings and associated metadata in formats suitable for post-processing and statistical analysis. We anticipate that the use of FEED will lead to new scientific findings and to studies that will generate data from novel mammalian species.