Virus Database and Online Inquiry System Based on Natural Vectors

Dong, Rui; Zheng, Hui; Tian, Kun; Yau, Shek-Chung; Mao, Weiguang; Yu, Wenping; Yin, Changchuan; Yu, Chenglong; He, Rong Lucy; Yang, Jie; Yau, Stephen ST

Currently, VirusDB can calculate the genome sequences of a virus. However, proteins have more direct functions during the procedure of virus infection and transmission. The protein sequences are also an important data source to understand the functions and relationships of viruses, and previous works have made some progress. 15 In 2016, we constructed a 60-dimensional protein space to analyze the evolutionary relationships of 4021 viruses by whole proteomes in the NCBI Reference Sequence Database. 13 The accuracy for randomly chosen 351 viruses data set can reach 95.4%, whereas the k-mer can only get 71.2% accuracy (k = 6 as the optimal). This inspires us to add the proteome information into our system, thus in subsequent version, users can input the proteome and get a prediction result based on genomes and proteomes. Predictions based on the protein sequences would be more related to the practical impact of viruses and would put more insight into the functions and mechanisms of viruses.