The RNA Virus Database

Belshaw, Robert; de Oliveira, Tulio; Markowitz, Sidney; Rambaut, Andrew

The RNA Virus Database is a PHP web application on top of a mySQL database. The underlying database has eight tables linked as shown in Figure 3 . PHP is available at http://www.php.net, but should come pre-installed on UNIX machines. MySQL is available free from http:// www.mysql.com. All data have been taken from the NCBI's Genome and Nucleotide sites at the following two URLs. (19) . Our approach was to treat all entries in the NCBI Virus Genome sites as species and to follow their taxonomic classification, although we only give virus type (e.g. single-stranded positive-sense, retrotranscribing), family and genus at our site. We, therefore, follow NCBI's inclusion of hepadnaviruses, which include HBV, and caulimoviruses among the RNA viruses despite their mature virion containing DNA rather than RNA (their possession of reverse transcriptase clearly places them biologically and evolutionarily among the reverse-transcribing group of RNA viruses).