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Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, computer programming, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to analyze and interpret biological data. The subsequent process of analyzing and interpreting data is referred to as computational biology.
A sequence profiling tool in bioinformatics is a type of software that presents information related to a genetic sequence, gene name, or keyword input. Such tools generally take a query such as a DNA, RNA, or protein sequence or ‘keyword’ and search one or more databases for information related to that sequence. Summaries and aggregate results are provided in standardized format describing the information that would otherwise have required visits to many smaller sites or direct literature searches to compile. Many sequence profiling tools are software portals or gateways that simplify the process of finding information about a query in the large and growing number of bioinformatics databases. The access to these kinds of tools is either web based or locally downloadable executables.
UniProt is a freely accessible database of protein sequence and functional information, many entries being derived from genome sequencing projects. It contains a large amount of information about the biological function of proteins derived from the research literature. It is maintained by the UniProt consortium, which consists of several European bioinformatics organisations and a foundation from Washington, DC, USA.
Ensembl genome database project is a scientific project at the European Bioinformatics Institute, which provides a centralized resource for geneticists, molecular biologists and other researchers studying the genomes of our own species and other vertebrates and model organisms. Ensembl is one of several well known genome browsers for the retrieval of genomic information.
The Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD) is a scientific database of the molecular biology and genetics of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is commonly known as baker's or budding yeast. Further information is located at the Yeastract curated repository.
MicrobesOnline is a publicly and freely accessible website that hosts multiple comparative genomic tools for comparing microbial species at the genomic, transcriptomic and functional levels. MicrobesOnline was developed by the Virtual Institute for Microbial Stress and Survival, which is based at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. The site was launched in 2005, with regular updates until 2011.
The UCSC Genome Browser is an online and downloadable genome browser hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). It is an interactive website offering access to genome sequence data from a variety of vertebrate and invertebrate species and major model organisms, integrated with a large collection of aligned annotations. The Browser is a graphical viewer optimized to support fast interactive performance and is an open-source, web-based tool suite built on top of a MySQL database for rapid visualization, examination, and querying of the data at many levels. The Genome Browser Database, browsing tools, downloadable data files, and documentation can all be found on the UCSC Genome Bioinformatics website.
PlasMapper (Plasmid Mapper) is a freely available web server that automatically generates and annotates high-quality circular plasmid maps. It is a particularly useful online service for molecular biologists wishing to generate plasmid maps without having to purchase or maintain expensive, commercial software. PlasMapper accepts plasmid/vector DNA sequence as input (FASTA format) and uses sequence pattern matching and BLAST sequence alignment to automatically identify and label common promoters, terminators, cloning sites, restriction sites, reporter genes, affinity tags, selectable marker genes, origins of replication and open reading frames. PlasMapper then reformats and presents the identified features in both a simple textual form and as high-resolution, multicolored image.
In molecular biology and genetics, DNA annotation or genome annotation is the process of describing the structure and function of the components of a genome, by analyzing and interpreting them in order to extract their biological significance and understand the biological processes in which they participate. Among other things, it identifies the locations of genes and all the coding regions in a genome and determines what those genes do.
The Human Metabolome Database (HMDB) is a comprehensive, high-quality, freely accessible, online database of small molecule metabolites found in the human body. It has been created by the Human Metabolome Project funded by Genome Canada and is one of the first dedicated metabolomics databases. The HMDB facilitates human metabolomics research, including the identification and characterization of human metabolites using NMR spectroscopy, GC-MS spectrometry and LC/MS spectrometry. To aid in this discovery process, the HMDB contains three kinds of data: 1) chemical data, 2) clinical data, and 3) molecular biology/biochemistry data (Fig. 1–3). The chemical data includes 41,514 metabolite structures with detailed descriptions along with nearly 10,000 NMR, GC-MS and LC/MS spectra.
The Toxin and Toxin-Target Database (T3DB), also known as the Toxic Exposome Database, is a freely accessible online database of common substances that are toxic to humans, along with their protein, DNA or organ targets. The database currently houses nearly 3,700 toxic compounds or poisons described by nearly 42,000 synonyms. This list includes various groups of toxins, including common pollutants, pesticides, drugs, food toxins, household and industrial/workplace toxins, cigarette toxins, and uremic toxins. These toxic substances are linked to 2,086 corresponding protein/DNA target records. In total there are 42,433 toxic substance-toxin target associations. Each toxic compound record (ToxCard) in T3DB contains nearly 100 data fields and holds information such as chemical properties and descriptors, mechanisms of action, toxicity or lethal dose values, molecular and cellular interactions, medical information, NMR an MS spectra, and up- and down-regulated genes. This information has been extracted from over 18,000 sources, which include other databases, government documents, books, and scientific literature.
MetaboAnalyst is a set of online tools for metabolomic data analysis and interpretation, created by members of the Wishart Research Group at the University of Alberta. It was first released in May 2009 and version 2.0 was released in January 2012. MetaboAnalyst provides a variety of analysis methods that have been tailored for metabolomic data. These methods include metabolomic data processing, normalization, multivariate statistical analysis, and data annotation. The current version is focused on biomarker discovery and classification.
Ensembl Genomes is a scientific project to provide genome-scale data from non-vertebrate species.
αr14 is a family of bacterial small non-coding RNAs with representatives in a broad group of α-proteobacteria. The first member of this family (Smr14C2) was found in a Sinorhizobium meliloti 1021 locus located in the chromosome (C). It was later renamed NfeR1 and shown to be highly expressed in salt stress and during the symbiotic interaction on legume roots. Further homology and structure conservation analysis identified 2 other chromosomal copies and 3 plasmidic ones. Moreover, full-length Smr14C homologs have been identified in several nitrogen-fixing symbiotic rhizobia, in the plant pathogens belonging to Agrobacterium species as well as in a broad spectrum of Brucella species. αr14C RNA species are 115-125 nt long and share a well defined common secondary structure. Most of the αr14 transcripts can be catalogued as trans-acting sRNAs expressed from well-defined promoter regions of independent transcription units within intergenic regions (IGRs) of the α-proteobacterial genomes.
In bioinformatics, the PANTHER classification system is a large curated biological database of gene/protein families and their functionally related subfamilies that can be used to classify and identify the function of gene products. PANTHER is part of the Gene Ontology Reference Genome Project designed to classify proteins and their genes for high-throughput analysis.
BacMap is a freely available web-accessible database containing fully annotated, fully zoomable and fully searchable chromosome maps from more than 2500 prokaryotic species. BacMap was originally developed in 2005 to address the challenges of viewing and navigating through the growing numbers of bacterial genomes that were being generated through large-scale sequencing efforts. Since it was first introduced, the number of bacterial genomes in BacMap has grown by more than 15X. Essentially BacMap functions as an on-line visual atlas of microbial genomes. All of the genome annotations in BacMap were generated through the BASys genome annotation system. BASys is a widely used microbial annotation infrastructure that performs comprehensive bioniformatic analyses on raw bacterial genome sequence data. All of the genome (chromosome) maps in BacMap were constructed using the program known as CGView. CGView is a popular visualization program for generating interactive, web-compatible circular chromosome maps. Each chromosome map in BacMap is extensively hyperlinked and each chromosome image can be interactively navigated, expanded and rotated using navigation buttons or hyperlinks. All identified genes in a BacMap chromosome map are colored according to coding directions and when sufficiently zoomed-in, gene labels are visible. Each gene label on a BacMap genome map is also hyperlinked to a 'gene card'. The gene cards provide detailed information about the corresponding DNA and protein sequences. Each genome map in BacMap is searchable via BLAST and a gene name/synonym search.
CGView is a freely available downloadable Java software program, applet and API for generating colorful, zoomable, hyperlinked, richly annotated images of circular genomes such as bacterial chromosomes, mitochondrial DNA and plasmids. It is commonly used in bacterial sequence annotation pipelines to generate visual output suitable for the web. It has also been used in a variety of popular web servers and databases (BacMap).
METAGENassist is a freely available web server for comparative metagenomic analysis. Comparative metagenomic studies involve the large-scale comparison of genomic or taxonomic census data from bacterial samples across different environments. Historically this has required a sound knowledge of statistics, computer programming, genetics and microbiology. As a result, only a small number of researchers are routinely able to perform comparative metagenomic studies. To circumvent these limitations, METAGENassist was developed to allow metagenomic analyses to be performed by non-specialists, easily and intuitively over the web. METAGENassist is particularly notable for its rich graphical output and its extensive database of bacterial phenotypic information.
Single nucleotide polymorphism annotation is the process of predicting the effect or function of an individual SNP using SNP annotation tools. In SNP annotation the biological information is extracted, collected and displayed in a clear form amenable to query. SNP functional annotation is typically performed based on the available information on nucleic acid and protein sequences.
References
- 1 2 Van Domselaar, GH; Stothard P; Shrivastava S; Cruz JA; Guo A; Dong X; Lu P; Szafron D; Greiner R; Wishart DS (July 2005). "BASys: a web server for automated bacterial genome annotation". Nucleic Acids Res. 33 (Web Server issue): W455–9. doi:10.1093/nar/gki593. PMC 1160269 . PMID 15980511.
- ↑ Stothard P, Van Domselaar G, Shrivastava S, Guo A, O'Neill B, Cruz J, Ellison M, Wishart DS (2005). "BacMap: an interactive picture atlas of annotated bacterial genomes". Nucleic Acids Res. 33 (Database issue): D317–20. doi:10.1093/nar/gki075. PMC 540029 . PMID 15608206.
- ↑ Stothard, P; Wishart DS (2005). "Circular genome visualization and exploration using CGView". Bioinformatics. 21 (4): 537–9. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bti054 . PMID 15479716.