In-silico approaches for the Identification and Genome Comparison of Animal Viruses

摘要

We have developed a highly structured database for animal viruses named AVIS. The collated information is authenticated, both at macro and micro levels. A software tool was developed to assign the family of an unknown virus deterministically using the probabilistic identification approach, which uses a set of 12 attributes. The probability weight matrices developed for virus identification did not include the molecular sequence data. VirGen, a comprehensive viral genome resource was developed recently to carry out comparisons of viruses at genomic level. VirGen employs the sequence-based Bioinformatics approaches to annotate viral genomes and to identify the 'alternate names' of viral proteins, where available. It archives the results of comparisons of genomes, proteomes and individual proteins within and between viral species. VirGen is the first resource to provide phylogenetic trees of viral species computed using whole genome sequence data. A case study exemplifying the use AVIS and VirGen resources to identify candidate for the design and development of a chimeric synthetic peptide vaccine against Japanese encephalitis virus is briefly discussed.