The RNA Virus Database

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

Some of the data and tools on the RNA Virus Database can be found elsewhere, but not all of them can, e.g. NCBI's Genome site provides genomic overviews of virus species and pairwise alignments of other isolates to the reference sequence, but it does not provide multiple alignments or complete translated genomes as we do. Similarly, its general Entrez site provides pair-wise alignments of the query sequence and similar sequences in the *To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: [phone]; Fax: [phone]; Email: ß 2008 The Author(s) This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. database, plus a phylogenetic tree calculated from those distances; however, no multiple alignment is built. We also corrected the (few) errors in the GenBank entries, and our database records features such as RNA editing (10) that make genome translation problematic.