The Menteric server


This produces a 1000bp long alignment starting at a given location.

Reference genome:

Address or gene name in the reference genome:

Address range: E. coli K-12: 1-4639221;   S. typhimurium LT2: 1-4951371, including the plasmid.

The complete gene lists of E. coli K-12 (ECO) and S. typhimurium LT2 (STM) are here.
 

Source for functional site annotations:  
    GenBank (for E. coli K-12)     RegulonDB (for E. coli K-12)     WUSTL (for S. typhimurium LT2)

Output format:       PostScript     PDF

Conservation criterion for drawing the conserved regions in the alignment:

Types of functional sites in the display:       Genes     Promoters     Proteins binding sites


Color coding for alignment underlays:

Light Chocolate  -- Genes (ORFs); Green  -- Promoters; Red  -- Protein Binding Sites.




Description


The Menteric web server computes and displays nucleotide-level multiple alignments of sequences from several related genomes in a 1Kb region starting at the user-specified address, or centered about the translation start site of the user-supplied gene. The alignment is rendered as a PostScript or PDF document in which annotations of ORFs, promoters and protein binding sites in the reference (i.e., E. coli K-12 or S. typhimurium LT2) genome are color-coded. Conserved regions, potentially associated with functional sites, are surrounded by boxes.

Annotation data for functional landmarks was collected from three sources. Annotations for E. coli K-12 were extracted, independently, from the GenBank E. coli annotation version M54 (Blattner et al, 1997), and from the RegulonDB  (Huerta et al, 1998;   Salgado et al, 2000) database. Annotations of S. typhimurium genes were obtained from the Genome Sequencing Center at the Washington University, St. Louis (WUSTL). The user can choose to color the functional regions according to either of the relevant sources. In addition, the user can select from several types of conservation criteria for identifying conserved regions. By default, regions longer than 6 nucleotides in which all columns have a letter agreement better than 80% are reported as conserved.

When the output is displayed as a PDF document, the annotation labels contain embedded links to various data repositories available on the web. In the E. coli comparative views, clicking on the name of a protein coding gene, for instance, leads to the NCBI page for the protein's COG classification (Tatusov et al, 1997;   2001), where available, whereas gene names in the S. typhimurium displays contain embedded hyperlinks to the WUSTL web page describing gene homologies between the E. coli and the S. typhimurium genomes. Promoter and protein binding site labels are links to the source of annotation data. Clicking on the sequence name on the right-hand side of the alignment downloads a web page containing the contig's sequence data.

In the display, promoter regions are shown in green, protein binding sites in red, and genes (ORF's) in light chocolate. The label ``PR'' above a green promoter band specifies that no experimental evidence has yet been found for it (hence, it is a predicted promoter), and ``+1'' marks the start of transcription. An abbreviation for the species name is indicated at the right end of each line.

List of abbreviations.
 



Page last revised Jan 27th, 2003.