Figure 4

Entity-Relationship diagram of the integrated database. The integrated database consists of two major, linked divisions, the marker database, which is independent from the QTL database. This allows easy updating of either component of the database or potentially allowing the QTL database to be linked to multiple maps. QTL are characterized in terms of trait types, allowing QTL for similar phenotypes originally described with different terms to be linked by a single category. The markers can be linked to external databases such as NCBI via STS accessions. This will allow eventual direct browsing of genome annotations within QTL regions using Gbrowse.