Anthony R. Kerlavage, Mark D. Adams, Judith Blake, Carol Bult, Rebecca Clayton, Lisa FitzGerald, Anna Glodek, Michael Heaney, Robert Shirley, Granger Sutton, Owen White, and J. Craig Venter
The Institute for Genomic Research, 9712 Medical Center Drive, Rockville, MD 20850
The recent determination of the complete sequence of the genomes of Haemophilus influenzae[1] and Mycoplasma genitalium*[2] have provided a tremendous amount of new information about genome organization and evolution on a whole-genome scale. In addition, the application of random sequencing from a large number of cDNA libraries to produce expressed sequence tags (ESTs) has provided a wealth of new information about gene expression, protein families and evolution.[3] The existence of these global datasets allows new kinds of questions to be posed; however, current data banks are inadequate to support the types of queries scientists will want to make using these data. We have designed the TIGR Database (TDB), a collection of databases of sequences and related data, to handle these requirements.
TDB currently consists of several components available via the World Wide Web (URL: http://www.tigr.org/tdb/tdb.html). The TIGR Microbial Database (MDB) provides curated information on complete bacterial genomes sequenced at TIGR, including putative genes with cellular role classifications. The Human cDNA Database (HCD) provides access to the most complete set of available EST data and offers name, role and sequence searching capability. The Expressed Gene Anatomy Database (EGAD) provides curated biological information relating to the function, role, expression and isology of cDNAs and their corresponding proteins. Sequences, Sources, Taxa (SST) integrates DNA and protein sequence data with specimen, collection and taxonomic information. All databases in TDB have been designed to facilitate interoperability with other relational databases of biological information, including the other TDB databases as well as external DNA, protein, mapping and citation databases.
*Supported by a grant from the Director, Office of Energy Research, Office of Health and Environmental Research of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-FC02-95ER61962.A001.
[1]Fleischmann et al., Science 269, 449-604 (1995).
[2]Fraser et al., Science, in press (1995).
[3]Adams et al., Nature, 377 suppl. 3-174 (1995).