This produces a 1000bp long alignment starting at a given location.
Color coding for alignment underlays:
Light Chocolate -- Genes (ORFs); | Green -- Promoters; | Red -- Protein Binding Sites. |
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.