Mutant photographs on the World Wide Web
--Neuffer, MG
In the past few years I've been trying to get stocks of most of
my maize mutant collection to the Stock Center. To make the
collection more useful, we decided to make the information that
had been accumulated about each mutant available on the World
Wide Web. This was made possible, of course, by the fact that Ed
Coe maintains MaizeDB (http://mnl.maizegdb.org), and I
had access to the excellent services of the MaizeDB curator, Mary
Polacco, and the database administrator, Denis Hancock. Our
first order of business was to create forms for each of the
mutants and enter as much information about each as possible.
By the time this was done, the technology had moved forward
enough to make adding a picture of each mutant feasible. For
many years I have been taking pictures (mostly slides) of maize
mutants, accumulating over time about 8,000 slides. After a very
laborious culling process, we had over 3,000 slides commercially
transferred to Kodak Photo CDs (prices for this service vary
widely, but we paid 88 cents per slide). We then cropped each
image to reduce its size, and attached the image to the relevant
MaizeDB variation form. Other than cropping, the images were
not edited or enhanced because there was no way to control the
look of the image as it would appear on various browsers. (For
those of you who are interested in the Photo CD technology, we
have had very good success with it. Up to 100 images can be
stored on each CD, and each image appears at 5 separate
resolutions. If you have huge amounts of computer memory and a
very good monitor, you can view the images at the highest
resolution and zoom in to enlarge even the tiniest dots and sectors.
Each PhotoCD comes with a "thumbnail" print, so a quick glance
will show you what is on the disk. We have not done this, but the
entire CD can be copied for about $20.) Some of the images are
not as good as I would have liked, but many of them are as good or
better than the slide. If you go to the MaizeDB home page, you will
see that the helpful curator has put a list of all these images under
"Of Interest to Maize Cooperators". (Note: these images are now availabe at http://www.maizegdb.org/cgi-bin/imagebrowser_mutants_by_mutation.cgi)
The next project will be to improve the captions for the images
and possibly to add the photos I have accumulated of other genes
that are not in my mutant collection. We are still in the process of
sending seed stocks to the Coop; they have now received stocks of
over 1300 mutants.
Please Note: Notes submitted to the Maize Genetics Cooperation Newsletter may be cited only with consent of the authors
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