CARTA to digitize extensive primate collection this summer

The unique collection was given to CARTA by the PFA Board of Directors. PFA Director Jo Fritz stated that the only requirement was that these resources be made available to the widest possible range of scientists interested in better understanding both humans and chimpanzees.

"We are very grateful to Jo Fritz for trusting CARTA and its mission by offering this unique collection of resources from captive chimpanzees," said Gagneux, who is also an assistant professor of cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego and a longtime collaborator with the PFA.

"It's always difficult to have an animal die, but to know that they will live on in science for eons to come makes it a bit easier," said Fritz.

CARTA Online Museum

Once digitized, the PFA chimpanzee collection will eventually be linked to CARTA's online Museum of Comparative Anthropogeny (MOCA). Together, these resources are a key part of an extensive website being developed by SDSC and CARTA researchers, providing scientists with detailed but easy-to-navigate comparisons between humans and other hominids, with the emphasis on uniquely human features.

"One of MOCA's goals is to catalog information about human-specific differences from great apes, which include chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans," said John Moreland, a senior software engineer with SDSC. During the last eight months, Moreland has been developing the CARTA website while spearheading efforts to digitize valuable information and collections such as the PFA collection. "We're confident that housing such information in a single, web-based resource will lead to new insights and collaborative research on both a national and global scale, resulting in ethically-sound studies to explain these differences."

The structure of the CARTA website site was established by analyzing the core capability requirements of the CARTA project, and then defining a limited number of top-level menu items that would logically cluster all content into those primary focus areas to aid user navigation. The site was also designed to provide multi-tier content access mechanisms, enabling administrators to provide content-level access protections as well as site area access controls.

"Providing informatics support for efforts such as CARTA lies at the core of SDSC's mission to provide state of the art cyberinfrastructure for scientific data and information management," said Chaitan Baru, SDSC Distinguished Scientist, who leads the informatics efforts for CARTA.

The CARTA site features a calendar of events including future and past symposia, and bibliography of virtual libraries for Anthropogeny and Primatology. During the next several months, the site will be expanded to include details of the CARTA faculty's planned graduate specialization program, as well as the first phase of the MOCA project.