THE PTLV DATABASE AND RESOURCES

Abstract

SP-27 The PTLV Database and Resources is a database of all published genetic data for the Primate T-cell Lymphotropic Viruses and provides a series of web-based resources to search and analyze HTLV and STLV genetic data. As there are more than 1,100 PTLV sequence in the genetic databases, mechanisms for maintaining the quality of the data records and facilitating their access are vital to the scientific community. The improvement of the quality of the PTLV data consists in completing the sequence record annotation with biological and epidemiological information such as the country of origin of the infected individual. Already the worldwide distribution of 500 sequence data originating from 40 countries is provided on the World Wide Web. By selecting a country, users can retrieve data from individual countries aligned with the HTLV sequence ATK (J02029). The alignment program has been designed for speed and uses the BLAST algorithm developed at NCBI for fast and sensitive searching of large sequence databases. Another web-based resource is the HTLV1 genotyping tool that compares a query sequence to a panel of reference sequences taken from the previously described four HTLV1 genotypes and returns the genotype of the closest reference sequence. During the genotyping process, multiple BLAST comparisons are made over a sliding window to increase the sensitivity of the program. The URL adress of the PTLV Database is http://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/retroviruses/HTLV/.