HERVd

HERVd: A

COMPREHENSIVE DATABASE OF HUMAN ENDOGENOUS RETROVIRUES

Jan

Paces, Adam Pavlicek and Vaclav Paces

Institute of Molecular Genetics, Academy of Sciences, CZ-16637 Prague, Czech

Republic

 

 

 

The human endogenous retroviruses database (HERVd) has

been developed at the Institute of Molecular Genetics, Academy of Sciences of

the Czech Republic, and is accessible via World Wide Web at

http://herv.img.cas.cz.  HERVd provides complex

information on the retroviral elements (HERVs) found in the human genome.  It is

being continuously updated so that the present version contains virtually all

elements including both elements with the classical retroviral structure (LTR-gag-pol(pro)-env-LTR)

and also nonautonomous elements that diverged considerably from the typical

retroviral genome.  It can be used for searches of individual HERV families,

identification of HERV fragments, comparison of HERVs and their structures and

identification of retroviral integration sites.  Both text and graphical outputs

of individual elements are available.  The total number of different HERV

families in the database is now over 150.  The database can be searched by

nucleotide sequences for DNA and protein similarities using FASTA and BLAT. 

Finally, the database is integrated with the human annotation and each element

is linked to the UCSC genome browser.