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Databases and Systems

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Thus, HOVERGEN allows one to do exhaustive searches of orthologous genes, but<br />

not of paralogous genes.<br />

It should be noted that alignments provided by HOVERGEN are crude results<br />

from CLUSTALV, without any manual correction. Moreover, when calculating<br />

phylogenetic trees, one should exclude ambiguous parts of the alignment, which<br />

cannot be done in our automatic procedure. We also have noted some problems in<br />

phylogenetic trees (such as negative branches) that are due to the fact that we include<br />

partial sequences in our classification. Thus, although trees provided by<br />

HOVERGEN are very useful for analyzing evolutionary relationships, one should not<br />

take them as exact phylogenetic trees.<br />

Perspectives<br />

Up to now, HOVERGEN was limited to vertebrates, but we plan to extend this<br />

database to all organisms. The classification will be exhaustive, so that it will be<br />

possible to systematically analyze not only orthologues but also paralogues. This new<br />

database will be based both on GenBank/EMBL (for DNA sequences), <strong>and</strong> on<br />

SWISSPROT-TREMBL [37] to have access to high quality annotations for protein<br />

sequences. The graphical interface of this system is being written in Java, so that it<br />

will be possible to use it from any computer system for which the Java Virtual<br />

Machine is available. Also, as the Java libraries include tools allowing simple<br />

INTERNET connections <strong>and</strong> client/server interactions, it will be possible to query<br />

this database either locally or remotely.<br />

Availability<br />

HOVERGEN is available by anonymous FTP from our server (ftp://biom3.univ-<br />

lyon1.fr/pub/hovergen/) or from the NCBI<br />

(ftp://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/repository/hovergen/). The QUERY_WIN program <strong>and</strong><br />

HOVERGEN graphical interface are available for UNIX platforms (Sun, SGI, DEC-<br />

Alpha, IBM-RS/6000). HOVERGEN can be used through the Web at:<br />

http://acnuc.univ-lyonl.fr/start.html/. It is also possible to ask for an account at the<br />

UK MRC HGMP Resource Centre (http://www.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk/) or at the French<br />

INFOBIOGEN server (http://www.infobiogen.fr/) to use HOVERGEN remotely with<br />

a X-window emulating software.<br />

Acknowledgments<br />

This work is supported by the French Centre National de la Recherche<br />

Scientifique (CNRS).<br />

33

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