ATGC: a database of orthologous genes from closely related prokaryotic genomes and a research platform for microevolution of prokaryotes

The database of Alignable Tight Genomic Clusters (ATGCs) consists of closely related genomes of archaea and bacteria, and is a resource for research into prokaryotic microevolution. Construction of a data set with appropriate characteristics is a major hurdle for this type of studies. With the current rate of genome sequencing, it is difficult to follow the progress of the field and to determine which of the available genome sets meet the requirements of a given research project, in particular, with respect to the minimum and maximum levels of similarity between the included genomes. Additionally, extraction of specific content, such as genomic alignments or families of orthologs, from a selected set of genomes is a complicated and time-consuming process. The database addresses these problems by providing an intuitive and efficient web interface to browse precomputed ATGCs, select appropriate ones and access ATGC-derived data such as multiple alignments of orthologous proteins, matrices of pairwise intergenomic distances based on genome-wide analysis of synonymous and nonsynonymous substitution rates and others. The ATGC database will be regularly updated following new releases of the NCBI RefSeq. The database is hosted by the Genomics Division at Lawrence Berkeley National laboratory and is publicly available at http://atgc.lbl.go

The Genome Portal of the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute

The Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) is a national user facility with massive-scale DNA sequencing and analysis capabilities dedicated to advancing genomics for bioenergy and environmental applications. Beyond generating tens of trillions of DNA bases annually, the Institute develops and maintains data management systems and specialized analytical capabilities to manage and interpret complex genomic data sets, and to enable an expanding community of users around the world to analyze these data in different contexts over the web. The JGI Genome Portal (http://genome.jgi.doe.gov) provides a unified access point to all JGI genomic databases and analytical tools. A user can find all DOE JGI sequencing projects and their status, search for and download assemblies and annotations of sequenced genomes, and interactively explore those genomes and compare them with other sequenced microbes, fungi, plants or metagenomes using specialized systems tailored to each particular class of organisms. We describe here the general organization of the Genome Portal and the most recent addition, MycoCosm (http://jgi.doe.gov/fungi), a new integrated fungal genomics resource