Fungal genome resources at NCBI

Abstract

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is well known for the nucleotide sequence archive, GenBank, and sequence analysis tool BLAST (basic local alignment search tool). However, NCBI integrates many types of biomolecular data from a variety of sources and makes it available to the scientific community as interactive web resources as well as organized releases of bulk data. These tools are available to explore and compare fungal genomes. Searching all databases with Fungi [organism] at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ is the quickest way to find resources of interest with fungal entries. Some tools though are resources specific and can be indirectly accessed from a particular database in the Entrez System. These include graphical viewers and comparative analysis tools such as TaxPlot, TaxMap, and UniGene DDD (found via UniGene Homepage). Genome Project and BioProject pages also serve as portals to external data such as community annotation websites, BioGrid, and UniProt. There are many different ways of accessing genomic data at NCBI. Depending on the focus and goal of research projects or the level of interest, a user would select a particular route for accessing genomic databases and resources. This review article describes methods of accessing fungal genome data and provides examples that illustrate the use of analysis tools.

Keywords:

• bioinformatics
• fungal genome
• comparative genomics
• Protein Clusters

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH, National Library of Medicine.