DOE Human Genome Program Contractor-Grantee Workshop VIII
February 27-March 2, 2000  Santa Fe, NM

115. The Comprehensive Microbial Resource

Owen White, Jeremy Peterson, Jonathan A. Eisen, and Steven L. Salzberg

The Institute for Genomic Research, Rockville, MD 20850

owhite@tigr.org

One of the challenges presented by large-scale genome sequencing efforts is the effective display of information in a format that is accessible to the laboratory scientist. Conventional databases offer the scientist the means to search for a particular gene, sequence, or organism, but do little in the way of dispaying the vast amounts of curated information that are becoming available. TIGR has developed methods to effectively "slice" the vast amounts of data in the sequencing databases in a wide variety of ways, allowing the user to formulate queries that search for specific genes as well as to investigate broader topics, such as genes that might serve as vaccine and drug targets.

The Comprehensive Microbial Resource (CMR) is a facility for annotation of TIGR genome sequencing projects, and a web presentation of all of the fully sequenced microbial genomes, the curation from the original sequencing centers, and further curation from TIGR (for those genomes sequenced outside TIGR). The web presentation of the CMR includes the comprehensive collection of bacterial genome sequences, curated information, and related informatics methodologies. The scientist can view genes within a genome and can also link across to related genes in other genomes. The effect is to be able to construct queries that include sequence searches, isoelectric point, GC-content, GC-skew, functional role assignments, growth conditions, environment and other questions, and isolate the genes of interest. The database contains extensive curated data as well as pre-run homology searches to facilitate data mining. The interface allows the display of the results in numerous formats that will help the user ask more accurate questions. This resource should be of value to the scientific community to design experiments and spur further research. Resources of this type are an essential tool to make sense of bacterial genome information as the number of completed genomes continues to grow.