title: ExoLocator--an online view into genetic makeup of vertebrate proteins.
abstract: ExoLocator (http://exolocator.eopsf.org) collects in a single place information needed for comparative analysis of protein-coding exons from vertebrate species. The main source of data--the genomic sequences, and the existing exon and homology annotation--is the ENSEMBL database of completed vertebrate genomes. To these, ExoLocator adds the search for ostensibly missing exons in orthologous protein pairs across species, using an extensive computational pipeline to narrow down the search region for the candidate exons and find a suitable template in the other species, as well as state-of-the-art implementations of pairwise alignment algorithms. The resulting complements of exons are organized in a way currently unique to ExoLocator: multiple sequence alignments, both on the nucleotide and on the peptide levels, clearly indicating the exon boundaries. The alignments can be inspected in the web-embedded viewer, downloaded or used on the spot to produce an estimate of conservation within orthologous sets, or functional divergence across paralogues.
authors.affiliation: Biomolecular Modeling and Design Division, Bioinformatics Institute 30 Biopolis Street, #07-01 Matrix, 138671 Singapore and Department of Electronic Systems and Information Processing, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Unska 3, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia.
authors.forename: Aik Aun
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Khoo
authors.forename: Mario
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ogrizek-Tomas
authors.forename: Ana
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bulovic
authors.forename: Matija
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Korpar
authors.forename: Ece
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Gürler
authors.forename: Ivan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Slijepcevic
authors.forename: Mile
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Šikic
authors.forename: Ivana
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Mihalek
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D030562:Databases, Protein; D005091:Exons; D015894:Genome, Human; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D011506:Proteins / Q000235:genetics*; D014714:Vertebrates / Q000235:genetics
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins