AVATAR: a database for genome-wide alternative splicing event detection using large scale ESTs and mRNAs.
In the past years, identification of alternative splicing (AS) variants has been gaining momentum. We developed AVATAR, a database for documenting AS using 5,469,433 human EST sequences and 26,159 human mRNA sequences. AVATAR contains 12000 alternative splicing sites identified by mapping ESTs and mRNAs with the whole human genome sequence. AVATAR also contains AS information for 6 eukaryotes. We mapped EST alignment information into a graph model where exons and introns are represented with vertices and edges, respectively. AVATAR can be queried using, (1) gene names, (2) number of identified AS events in a gene, (3) minimal number of ESTs supporting a splicing site, etc. as search parameters. The system provides visualized AS information for queried genes.


BACKGROUND
The database is available for free at http://avatar.iecs.fcu.edu.tw/
Hsu
Fang Rong
FR
Bioinformatics Research Center, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taiwan. frhsu@fcu.edu.tw
Chang
Hwan-You
HY
Lin
Yaw-Lin
YL
Tsai
Yin-Te
YT
Peng
Hui-Ling
HL
Chen
Ying Tsong
YT
Cheng
Chia Yang
CY
Shih
Min Yao
MY
Liu
Chia-Hung
CH
Chen
Chin-Feng
CF