CoVDB: a comprehensive database for comparative analysis of coronavirus genes and genomes

Huang, Yi; Lau, Susanna K. P.; Woo, Patrick C. Y.; Yuen, Kwok-yung

Batch sequence retrieval. The main goal for setting up CoVDB is to provide a convenient and efficient platform for retrieving batches of coronavirus gene sequences. The interfaces of the database are simple and user friendly. All genes and genomes contain links to GenBank and/or pubmed. CoVDB contains two main pages for sequence retrieval. From the homepage, one can enter the first main page for retrieval of complete genomes and their genes by clicking 'CoVDB' (Figure 2a) . From this page, users can obtain genes from specific coronavirus species by selecting the corresponding check boxes. We defined one representative genome from each species as the 'Type strain'. Most of the time, this 'Type strain' is the one assigned as the reference sequence in GenBank. By choosing the 'Type strain only' option, users can obtain one gene sequence per species and construct phylogenetic tree or perform other comparisons. An example of retrieving complete genome or a specific gene of complete genome of selected species is shown in Figure 2b and c.