{"id":2043,"date":"2018-01-16T11:41:38","date_gmt":"2018-01-16T16:41:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/?p=2043"},"modified":"2018-03-19T11:45:53","modified_gmt":"2018-03-19T15:45:53","slug":"viral-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/2018\/01\/16\/viral-surveillance\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing the new Virus Sequence Search Interface"},"content":{"rendered":"

BLAST is a powerful search tool, but often a search is just the beginning of the journey. We put ourselves in the shoes of a researcher who has just sequenced a handful of samples from the latest viral outbreak and tried to understand what information would be most useful. We also reached out to researchers in the field and asked: a) what questions do they really<\/em> want to answer? and b) how can NCBI best provide the answers? Based on insights from those questions and answers, we developed the new Virus Sequence Search Interface<\/a> (Fig. 1). The Search Interface is an NCBI Labs project, which means it is an experimental project, and we may modify the resource based on your feedback and experiences.<\/p>\n

\"Figure<\/a>
Figure 1.<\/strong> The Virus Sequence Selection Interface. The Virus Sequence Selection Interface accepts as input nucleotide and protein accessions, as well as FASTA and plain-text formatted sequences. The user selects either \u201cNucleotide\u201d or \u201cProtein,\u201d depending on the sequence type, and selects the virus type from the pull-down menu below the text entry field.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This tool provides rapid insight into query sequences by presenting Blastn and Blastp results alongside normalized metadata, when available. These include: isolation source, host, country, and date, as well as genetic attributes such as completeness, and segment or protein names when applicable. The normalized metadata is generated via an internal, curator-guided data-processing pipeline that maps sequence-record attributes to standardized vocabularies to provide a user-friendly view of the data.<\/p>\n

The interface currently supports BLAST searches for influenza viruses, rotavirus A, dengue viruses, West Nile virus, Zika virus, ebolaviruses, and MERS coronavirus sequences.<\/p>\n

Get started now:<\/strong><\/p>\n