Genomic projects heavily depend on genome annotations and are limited by the 
current deficiencies in the published predictions of gene structure and 
function. It follows that, improved annotation will allow better data mining of 
genomes, and more secure planning and design of experiments. The purpose of the 
GeneFarm project is to obtain homogeneous, reliable, documented and traceable 
annotations for Arabidopsis nuclear genes and gene products, and to enter them 
into an added-value database. This re-annotation project is being performed 
exhaustively on every member of each gene family. Performing a family-wide 
annotation makes the task easier and more efficient than a gene-by-gene approach 
since many features obtained for one gene can be extrapolated to some or all the 
other genes of a family. A complete annotation procedure based on the most 
efficient prediction tools available is being used by 16 partner laboratories, 
each contributing annotated families from its field of expertise. A database, 
named GeneFarm, and an associated user-friendly interface to query the 
annotations have been developed. More than 3000 genes distributed over 300 
families have been annotated and are available at 
http://genoplante-info.infobiogen.fr/Genefarm/. Furthermore, collaboration with 
the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is underway to integrate the GeneFarm data 
into the protein knowledgebase Swiss-Prot.