IMGC Web Portal: Tutorial

The new International Milk Genomics Consortium Research Portal has been redesigned from the ground up.  The challenge was to design and build a system that is simultaneously: easy for naïve users to browse and get results immediately, yet is powerful enough to answer both detailed and abstract questions about the biology of milk and its health-giving properties, and is also easy for users-at-large to contribute to the knowledge curation process.

Intuitive graphic user interfaces have been designed to leverage users' familiarity with popular software products and services such as Google, Wikipedia, Microsoft Word, and EndNote.  Furthermore, users will find embeded inside the IMGC portal, familiar websites such as: NCBI, OMIM, UCSC Genome Browser, IHOP, Kegg, and many more.  By making the contents of these sites available to the IMGC Portal Catalog, users have a "one stop shopping environment" for querying the most relevant and current information known about lactation and milk genes, their products and pathways, and the health benefits that they confer.  In addition to querying the portal's catalog of known information, users can add to the repository of knowledge of specific genes by contributing lactation-specific annotations, bibliographic references, or any other reference materials that exist in an electronic form.  Each of these functions are demonstrated in one contiguous real-world example of utilizing the IMGC Portal in the manuscript preparation process for a scholarly article related to milk and human health.