| *Abstract*
Phenotypic data are routinely used to elucidate gene and protein function in most organisms amenable to experimental manipulation. However, although phenotype ontologies exist for many eukaryotic model organisms, no standardized system exists for the capture of phenotypic information in bacteria. We propose to build an Ontology of Microbial Phenotypes and use it to annotate the prokaryotic model organism _Escherichia coli_.

*Introduction*
Phenotypes are the observable characteristics of an organism that result from the combination of a particular genotype and a particular environment, and thus are a basic and fundamental aspect of the biology of all organisms. The awesome power... |
