A paper describing the development of the Japanese translation of the Mammalian Phenotype Ontology (MP) has been published.
Publication
Takatsuki T, Bello SM, Kushida T, Dohi E, Yoshiki A, Fujiwara T, Goto S, Masuya H.
Development and Dissemination of the Japanese Translation of the Mammalian Phenotype Ontology as an Open Resource. Congenit Anom (Kyoto). 2026 Jan-Dec;66(1):e70070. doi: 10.1002/cga.70070. PMID: 42396930
A paper describing the development of the Japanese translation of the Mammalian Phenotype Ontology (MP) has been published in Congenital Anomalies, the official journal of the Japanese Teratology Society. MP is a controlled vocabulary developed by Mouse Genome Informatics (MGI) at The Jackson Laboratory in the United States to standardize the description of mammalian phenotypes in databases. It is widely used by major biomedical databases worldwide. In this study, approximately 14,000 MP terms were translated into Japanese, and the resulting Japanese language profile was adopted as part of the official MP International Edition by MGI. This represents an important achievement in the internationalization of MP. Following previous efforts to localize the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO), which describes human disease phenotypes, this work provides a Japanese-language foundation for model animal phenotype terminology. The “Experimental Animal Congenital Anomaly Database” in Japanese and English, developed and made publicly available by the Terminology Committee of the Japanese Teratology Society , was used in this study as reference terminology to support the accuracy and consistency of terms related to developmental abnormalities and congenital anomalies. By complementing domain expertise that cannot be fully ensured by AI-based translation alone, this resource contributed to improving the quality of the Japanese MP. This work represents an important example of academic terminology developed over many years by the Japanese Teratology Society being utilized as a knowledge resource supporting an international standard ontology and the life science data infrastructure of the AI era. The Japanese MP is expected to further promote data integration across mouse phenotypes, human congenital anomalies, and rare disease research.
