How are the WormBase entries created and maintained?
There is no simple answer to that. WormBase has a team of about 30 people who generate and curate data in many different ways. The genome sequence of C. elegans was determined at two of the four WormBase groups, and so a lot of data pertaining to gene predictions and other features annotated on to the genome are created and maintained by those groups. The group at Caltech do a lot of literature curation and extract all sorts of information from the published literature (from hand-curated descriptions of gene function to details of individual RNAi experiments). Also a lot of data comes from 3rd party collaborators who submit bulk datasets direct to WormBase (e.g. Orfeome data, ‘knockout’ deletion alleles). In contrast we also get directly submitted data from users at a very small level, e.g. individual allele submissions. Finally, we also generate data de novo as part of the database build procedure, e.g. calculating molecular weights of proteins.
