Biochemistry, Department of
Date of this Version
2013
Citation
Nucleic Acids Research, 2014, Vol. 42, Database issue D437–D443 doi:10.1093/nar/gkt1045.
Abstract
SelenoDB (http://www.selenodb.org) aims to provide high-quality annotations of selenoprotein genes, proteins and SECIS elements. Selenoproteins are proteins that contain the amino acid selenocysteine (Sec) and the first release of the database included annotations for eight species. Since the release of SelenoDB 1.0 many new animal genomes have been sequenced. The annotations of selenoproteins in new genomes usually contain many errors in major databases. For this reason, we have now fully annotated selenoprotein genes in 58 animal genomes. We provide manually curated annotations for human selenoproteins, whereas we use an automatic annotation pipeline to annotate selenoprotein genes in other animal genomes. In addition, we annotate the homologous genes containing cysteine (Cys) instead of Sec. Finally, we have surveyed genetic variation in the annotated genes in humans. We use exon capture and resequencing approaches to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms in more than 50 human populations around the world. We thus present a detailed view of the genetic divergence of Sec- and Cys-containing genes in animals and their diversity in humans. The addition of these data sets into the second release of the database provides a valuable resource for addressing medical and evolutionary questions in selenium biology.
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Comments
Copyright The Author(s) 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.