HTT-DB: new features and updates.

Antonio Mauro Rezende,Paulo Marcos Pinto,Alexandre Freitas Da Silva,Gabriel Da Luz Wallau,Evelise Leis Carvalho,Bruno Reis Dotto,Tulio De Lima Campos,Filipe Zimmer Dezordi

doi:10.1093/database/bax102

Abstract

Horizontal Transfer (HT) of genetic material between species is a common phenomenon among Bacteria and Archaea species and several databases are available for information retrieval and data mining. However, little attention has been given to this phenomenon among eukaryotic species mainly due to the lower proportion of these events. In the last years, a vertiginous amount of new HT events involving eukaryotic species was reported in the literature, highlighting the need of a common repository to keep the scientific community up to date and describe overall trends. Recently, we published the first HT database focused on HT of transposable elements among eukaryotes: the Horizontal Transposon Transfer DataBase: Database URL: (http://lpa.saogabriel.unipampa.edu.br: 8080/httdatabase/). Here, we present new features and updates of this unique database: (i) its expansion to include virus-host exchange of genetic material, which we called Horizontal Virus Transfer (HVT) and (ii) the availability of a web server for HT detection, where we implemented the online version of vertical and horizontal inheritance consistence analysis (VHICA), an R package developed for HT detection. These improvements will help researchers to navigate through known HVT cases, take data-informed decision and export figures based on keywords searches. Moreover, the availability of the VHICA as an online tool will make this software easily reachable even for researchers with no or little computation knowledge as well as foster our capability to detect new HT events in a wide variety of taxa. Database URL: http://lpa.saogabriel.unipampa.edu.br:8080/httdatabase/

Highlights

Genetic inheritance is the main mode of genetic material transmission from ancestral to descendent individuals or species
There is another phenomenon which allows the transfer of genetic material between biological entities known as Horizontal Transfer (HT)
HTs are named based on the genetic entity which is transferred between species as Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) and Horizontal Transposon Transfer (HTT)

Summary

Introduction

Genetic inheritance is the main mode of genetic material transmission from ancestral to descendent individuals or species Such process is widely known as vertical transfer of genetic material. There is another phenomenon which allows the transfer of genetic material between biological entities known as Horizontal Transfer (HT) Such HT events are very frequent in prokaryotic species, having a great impact on the exchange of different classes of genes such as anti-biotic resistance genes. No database was available for HT events among eukaryotic species until 2015 Based on this gap, we developed the Horizontally Transferred Transposable Element Database (HTT-DB) which allows researchers to have access to all known HTT cases among eukaryotes and perform searches on these data using TEs [Repbase––(6) and host species (https:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/taxonomy)] keywords [7]. Transfer–HVT) as well as the availability of a web server implementing a recently published method for HT detection [8]

Database interface for horizontal virus transfer

Interface for vertical and horizontal inheritance consistence analysis

Conclusion