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Creation and unification of development and life stage ontologies for animals

With the new era of genomics, an increasing number of animal species are amenable to large-scale data generation. This had led to the emergence of new multi-species ontologies to annotate and organize these data. While anatomy and cell types are well covered by these efforts, information regarding development and life stages is also critical in the annotation of animal data. Its lack can hamper our ability to answer comparative biology questions and to interpret functional results. We present here a collection of development and life stage ontologies for 21 animal species, and their merge into a common multi-species ontology. This work has allowed the integration and comparison of transcriptomics data in 52 animal species.