Online identification of viruses
Kolaskar, A.S.; Naik, P.S.
Journal of Microbiology Immunology and Infection 33(2): 69-78
2000
ISSN/ISBN: 1684-1182 PMID: 10917875 Document Number: 522467
A computerized animal virus information system is developed in the Sequence Retrieval System (SRS) format. This database is available on the Word Wide Web (WWW) at the site http://bioinfo.ernet.in/www/avis/avis.html. The database has been used to generate large numbers of identification matrices for each family. The software is developed in C. Unix shell scripts and Hypertext Marked-up Language (HTML) to assign the family to an unknown virus deterministically and to identify the virus probabilistically. It has been shown that such web based virus identification approach provides results with high confidence in those cases where identification matrix uses large numbers of independent characters. Protein sequence data for animal viruses have been analysed and oligopeptides specific to each virus family and also specific to each virus species are identified for several viruses. These peptides thus could be used to identify the virus and to assign the virus family with high confidence showing the usefulness of sequence data in virus identification.