TcruziDB: A Trypanosoma cruzi Genome Resource Update

KISSINGER, J. C.; FERNÁN AGÜERO,; ZHENG, W.

Woods Hole, MA

Otro; Molecular Parasitology Meeting; 2005

Marine Biological Laboratory

TcruziDB: A Trypanosoma cruzi Genome Resource UpdateJessica Kissinger1, Fernan Aguero2, Wenlong Zheng3 1. Department of Genetics, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA 2. UNSAM, Buenos Aires, Argentina 3. Department of Computer Science, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA Address correspondence to: jkissing1@uga.edu TcruziDB (http://TcruziDB.org) is an integrated genomic resource for Trypanosoma cruzi, the causative agent of Chagas’ disease. TcruziDB was established in 2003 with tools for mining the unannotated sequence reads and preliminary contig assemblies emerging from the Tri-Tryp genome consortium (TIGR/SBRI/Karolinska). Today TcruziDB houses assembled genome contigs and published annotation provided by the genome consortium as well as clustered EST sequences and proteomic expression data. These diverse data types have been integrated into a relational database architecture that permits queries that span across the data types. For example, it is possible to search for all annotated proteins that have evidence of both EST and proteomic expression in a particular lifecycle stage. Also, since the addition of EST datasets from full-length cDNA libraries, it is now possible to search for genes with known trans-splicing acceptor sites. These results can be downloaded for further analysis or combined with results from other analysis tools. The database provides access to BLAST searches of all available sequence data and automated multiple sequence alignments of significant hits. Text searches by keyword, searches for user-defined protein motifs, and searches of kinetoplastid orthologous genes are also provided. With the completion of the three kineotplastid genomes, further enhancements are planned. Links to GeneDB are provided for each T. cruzi gene to facilitate comparative analyses, and gene onotology (GO) terms and EC numbers will be added. Additionally, we are expanding the database schema to accommodate haplotype information for T. cruzi as it becomes available.