Virxicon: A lexicon of viral sequences

Abstract

Motivation: Viruses are the most abundant biological entities and constitute a large reservoir of genetic diversity. In recent years, knowledge about them has increased significantly as a result of dynamic development in life sciences and rapid technological progress. This knowledge is scattered across various data repositories, making a comprehensive analysis of viral data difficult. Results: In response to the need for gathering a comprehensive knowledge of viruses and viral sequences, we developed Virxicon, a lexicon of all experimentally acquired sequences for RNA and DNA viruses. The ability to quickly obtain data for entire viral groups, searching sequences by levels of taxonomic hierarchy - according to the Baltimore classification and ICTV taxonomy - and tracking the distribution of viral data and its growth over time are unique features of our database compared to the other tools. Availabilityand implementation: Virxicon is a publicly available resource, updated weekly. It has an intuitive web interface and can be freely accessed at http://virxicon.cs.put.poznan.pl/.