Finding the Core-Genes of Chloroplasts

Due to the recent evolution of sequencing techniques, the number of available genomes is rising steadily, leading to the possibility to make large scale genomic comparison between sets of close species. An interesting question to answer is: what is the common functionality genes of a collection of species, or conversely, to determine what is specific to a given species when compared to other ones belonging in the same genus, family, etc. Investigating such problem means to find both core and pan genomes of a collection of species, \textit{i.e.}, genes in common to all the species vs. the set of all genes in all species under consideration. However, obtaining trustworthy core and pan genomes is not an easy task, leading to a large amount of computation, and requiring a rigorous methodology. Surprisingly, as far as we know, this methodology in finding core and pan genomes has not really been deeply investigated. This research work tries to fill this gap by focusing only on chloroplastic genomes, whose reasonable sizes allow a deep study. To achieve this goal, a collection of 99 chloroplasts are considered in this article. Two methodologies have been investigated, respectively based on sequence similarities and genes names taken from annotation tools. The obtained results will finally be evaluated in terms of biological relevance

Web API for biology with a workflow navigation system

DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) provides Web-based systems for biological analysis, called Web APIs for biology (WABI). So far, we have developed over 20 SOAP services and several workflows that consist of a series of method invocations. In this article, we present newly developed services of WABI, that is, REST-based Web services, additional workflows and a workflow navigation system. Each Web service and workflow can be used as a complete service or a building block for programmers to construct more complex information processing systems. The workflow navigation system aims to help non-programming biologists perform analysis tasks by providing next applicable services on Web browsers according to the output of a previously selected service. With this function, users can apply multiple services consecutively only by following links without any programming or manual copy-and-paste operations on Web browsers. The listed services are determined automatically by the system referring to the dictionaries of service categories, the input/output types of services and HTML tags. WABI and the workflow navigation system are freely accessible at http://www.xml.nig.ac.jp/index.html and http://cyclamen.ddbj.nig.ac.jp/, respectively

TogoWS: integrated SOAP and REST APIs for interoperable bioinformatics Web services

Web services have become widely used in bioinformatics analysis, but there exist incompatibilities in interfaces and data types, which prevent users from making full use of a combination of these services. Therefore, we have developed the TogoWS service to provide an integrated interface with advanced features. In the TogoWS REST (REpresentative State Transfer) API (application programming interface), we introduce a unified access method for major database resources through intuitive URIs that can be used to search, retrieve, parse and convert the database entries. The TogoWS SOAP API resolves compatibility issues found on the server and client-side SOAP implementations. The TogoWS service is freely available at: http://togows.dbcls.jp/

GenBank

GenBank® is a comprehensive database that contains publicly available nucleotide sequences for more than 300 000 organisms named at the genus level or lower, obtained primarily through submissions from individual laboratories and batch submissions from large-scale sequencing projects, including whole genome shotgun (WGS) and environmental sampling projects. Most submissions are made using the web-based BankIt or standalone Sequin programs, and accession numbers are assigned by GenBank staff upon receipt. Daily data exchange with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Nucleotide Sequence Database in Europe and the DNA Data Bank of Japan ensures worldwide coverage. GenBank is accessible through the NCBI Entrez retrieval system, which integrates data from the major DNA and protein sequence databases along with taxonomy, genome, mapping, protein structure and domain information, and the biomedical journal literature via PubMed. BLAST provides sequence similarity searches of GenBank and other sequence databases. Complete bi-monthly releases and daily updates of the GenBank database are available by FTP. To access GenBank and its related retrieval and analysis services, begin at the NCBI homepage: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

The GTOP database in 2009: updated content and novel features to expand and deepen insights into protein structures and functions

The Genomes TO Protein Structures and Functions (GTOP) database (http://spock.genes.nig.ac.jp/~genome/gtop.html) freely provides an extensive collection of information on protein structures and functions obtained by application of various computational tools to the amino acid sequences of entirely sequenced genomes. GTOP contains annotations of 3D structures, protein families, functions, and other useful data of a protein of interest in user-friendly ways to give a deep insight into the protein structure. From the initial 1999 version, GTOP has been continually updated to reap the fruits of genome projects and augmented to supply novel information, in particular intrinsically disordered regions. As intrinsically disordered regions constitute a considerable fraction of proteins and often play crucial roles especially in eukaryotes, their assignments give important additional clues to the functionality of proteins. Additionally, we have incorporated the following features into GTOP: a platform independent structural viewer, results of HMM searches against SCOP and Pfam, secondary structure predictions, color display of exon boundaries in eukaryotic proteins, assignments of gene ontology terms, search tools, and master files

Petabyte-scale innovations at the European Nucleotide Archive

Dramatic increases in the throughput of nucleotide sequencing machines, and the promise of ever greater performance, have thrust bioinformatics into the era of petabyte-scale data sets. Sequence repositories, which provide the feed for these data sets into the worldwide computational infrastructure, are challenged by the impact of these data volumes. The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA; http://www.ebi.ac.uk/embl), comprising the EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database and the Ensembl Trace Archive, has identified challenges in the storage, movement, analysis, interpretation and visualization of petabyte-scale data sets. We present here our new repository for next generation sequence data, a brief summary of contents of the ENA and provide details of major developments to submission pipelines, high-throughput rule-based validation infrastructure and data integration approaches

Towards Viral Genome Annotation Standards, Report from the 2010 NCBI Annotation Workshop

Improvements in DNA sequencing technologies portend a new era in virology and could possibly lead to a giant leap in our understanding of viral evolution and ecology. Yet, as viral genome sequences begin to fill the world’s biological databases, it is critically important to recognize that the scientific promise of this era is dependent on consistent and comprehensive genome annotation. With this in mind, the NCBI Genome Annotation Workshop recently hosted a study group tasked with developing sequence, function, and metadata annotation standards for viral genomes. This report describes the issues involved in viral genome annotation and reviews policy recommendations presented at the NCBI Annotation Workshop

MINT, the molecular interaction database: 2009 update

MINT (http://mint.bio.uniroma2.it/mint) is a public repository for molecular interactions reported in peer-reviewed journals. Since its last report, MINT has grown considerably in size and evolved in scope to meet the requirements of its users. The main changes include a more precise definition of the curation policy and the development of an enhanced and user-friendly interface to facilitate the analysis of the ever-growing interaction dataset. MINT has adopted the PSI-MI standards for the annotation and for the representation of molecular interactions and is a member of the IMEx consortium