DPVweb provides a central source o …
DPVweb provides a central source of information about viruses, viroids and satellites of plants, fungi and protozoa. Comprehensive taxonomic information, including brief descriptions of each family and genus, and classified lists of virus sequences are provided. The database also holds detailed, curated, information for all sequences of viruses, viroids and satellites of plants, fungi and protozoa that are complete or that contain at least one complete gene.
For comparative purposes, it also contains a single representative sequence of all other fully sequenced virus species with an RNA or single-stranded DNA genome. The start and end positions of each feature (gene, non-translated region and the like) have been recorded and checked for accuracy. As far as possible, nomenclature for genes and proteins are standardized within genera and families. Sequences of features (either as DNA or amino acid sequences) can be directly downloaded from the website in FASTA format. The sequence information can also be accessed via client software for PC computers (freely downloadable from the website) that enable users to make an easy selection of sequences and features of a chosen virus for further analyses.
The public sequence databases contain vast amounts of data on virus genomes but accessing and comparing the data, except for relatively small sets of related viruses can be very time consuming. The procedure is made difficult because some of the sequences on these databases are incorrectly named, poorly annotated or redundant. The NCBI Reference Sequence project (1) provides a comprehensive, integrated, non-redundant set of sequences, including genomic DNA, transcript (RNA) and protein products, for major research organisms. This now includes curated information for a single sequence of each fully sequenced virus species. While this is a welcome development, it can only deal with complete sequences.
An important feature of DPV is the opportunity to access genes (and other features) of multiple sequences quickly and accurately. Thus, for example, it is easy to obtain the nucleotide or amino acid sequences of all the available accessions of the coat protein gene of a given virus species or for a group of viruses. To increase its usefulness further, DPVweb also contains a single representative sequence of all other fully sequenced virus species with an RNA or single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) genome.