GOVERNMENT

Improvements, updates, and additions to the National Microbial Pathogen Data Resource (NMPDR) recently were announced, making NMPDR Version 5 a more productive tool for infectious disease researchers. NMPDR is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease as a Bioinformatics Resource Center to support research in biodefense, emerging infectious diseases, and re-emerging pathogens. NMPDR provides researchers with a single Web-based entry point to organism-related data necessary for advanced study and applications, such as the identification of potential targets for the development of vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics. NMPDR provides the advanced bioinformatics environment needed to identify genetic polymorphisms that correlate with phenotypes such as pathogenicity, drug resistance, morbidity, and infectivity. NMPDR is both a central repository for a wide variety of scientific data on these pathogenic microorganisms and a platform for software tools that support investigator-driven data analysis. NMPDR Version 5 includes: * 33 "core pathogen" genomes: five Campylobacters, four Listeria monocytogenes, six Staphylococcus aureus, eight Streptococcus pyogenes (group A strep), three Streptococcus agalactiae (group B strep), two Streptococcus pneumoniae, and four pathogenic Vibrios. * 366 supporting genomes from all three domains. These provide a broad context for comparative analysis. * About 500 subsystems have been constructed and about 30 percent of the genes within the core pathogen genomes have been connected to subsystems. * NMPDR organisms now appear at the top of the list of search results. * It is now possible to retrieve 500-nucleotide flanking regions along with the DNA sequence of each gene. NMPDR is a collaboration among researchers from the Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, FIG, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).