ViPR: an open bioinformatics database and analysis resource for virology research

Pickett, Brett E.; Sadat, Eva L.; Zhang, Yun; Noronha, Jyothi M.; Squires, R. Burke; Hunt, Victoria; Liu, Mengya; Kumar, Sanjeev; Zaremba, Sam; Gu, Zhiping; Zhou, Liwei; Larson, Christopher N.; Dietrich, Jonathan; Klem, Edward B.; Scheuermann, Richard H.

With foresight into the importance of providing access to such information, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) within the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) implemented the Bioinformatics Resource Centers (BRC) for Infectious Diseases program (5, 6) to develop open, integrated online resources for data about human pathogens. Five such centers currently exist, each supporting a different class of human pathogens or insect vectors (www .pathogenportal.org). The Virus Pathogen Database and Analysis Resource (ViPR; www.ViPRbrc.org) serves as the publicly accessible repository for viruses categorized as either A-C priority pathogens or viruses that adversely affect public health (http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/ biodefenserelated/biodefense/research/pages/cata.aspx). ViPR is unique among other virus-centered databases in that it contains a wealth of integrated information for a large number of virus families that are pathogenic specifically to humans. This is in contrast with the NCBI viral genome project, which provides sequence data for all viruses (7) or the Human Immunodeficiency Virus sequence database (http://www.hiv.lanl.gov) and the Influenza Research Database (IRD, www.fludb.org) (8) , which focus on a particular taxon or virus pathogen.