BioIT: EBI launches genome reviews database

Tthe European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) has launched Genome Reviews 1.0, a standardised resource for completely sequenced genomes, consisting of 256 chromosomes and plasmids, representing the complete genomes of 153 prokaryotic organisms.

The database addresses an important problem: the hundreds of complete genome sequences in the three public DNA databases -- EMBL-Bank, GenBank and DDBJ -- typically remain static after they have been deposited, even though they are constantly being annotated, revised, and updated by the research community. This resource is located at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/GenomeReviews/.

Updated every two weeks, Genome Reviews includes some 2.5 million cross-references to many other resources such as encoded proteins in UniProt, the GO Annotation database, or information about related proteins in InterPro.

“Perhaps most importantly,” says developer Paul Kersey, “we’ve standardised annotations that are used inconsistently in the original submissions, so it’s now much easier to compare the data across several genomes. Users can also track the source of data in Genome Reviews using evidence tags: around 4.5 million of these have been added.”

Genome Reviews will cover all prokaryotes where the sequences and assemblies are in the EMBL database. Later this year or next year, the database will be expanded to include lower eukaryotic genomes.

Annotated genomes of higher eukaryotes, including human, can be found in EnsEMBL.

Genome Reviews was developed as part of the TEMBLOR project funded by the European Commission. A new user interface is under development that will allow integrated queries across Genome Reviews and other EBI data resources.