Viral Bioinformatics Research Centre

Chris Upton, University of Victoria, Canada

Baculoviridae

Baculoviridae

The baculovirus database is not currently being actively maintained.  Please contact us if you have a project needing a baculovirus resource.

Baculoviridae are a family of invertebrate viruses containing two genera: Nucleopolyhedrovirus and Granulovirus. Virions have a complex construction and consist of an envelope and a nucleocapsid. The genome is not segmented and consists of a single molecule of circular, supercoiled double-stranded DNA. The complete genome is 90000-230000 nucleotides long.

Baculoviruses and the VBRC

The VBRC provides comprehensive web-based genomics resources to the scientific community through: 

  • Providing up-to-date genomic and proteomic data from the virus families.
    • see Organisms menu for a list of virus families supported
  • Providing easy-to-use software tools to perform a variety of bioinformatics analyses.
    • see Tools menu for a list of software tools
    • we also build software to tackle specific bioinformatics/virology problems, often in collaboration with virologists.
  • Offering researchers help on specific bioinformatics problems.

You can find the VBRC’s mandate here and more information on the home page.

Analysis tools at the VBRC

We provide highly interactive software tools that enable users to view and analyze viral genomes. These tools can be accessed directly from the “Baculoviridae Tools” drop-down menu on the top left of this page. These tools include:

  • Viral Orthologous Clusters (VOCs) allows users to easily search the Baculoviridae database for protein sequences or genes of a known function or of a specific genome and then apply different analysis techniques to the search result. VOCs provides quick and easy access to tools like BLAST, multiple alignment, dotplots, and genome statistics.
  • Viral Genome Organizer (VGO) allows users to browse genomes, viewing genes, ORFs, start/stop codons, nucleic acid composition, and orthologs when working with multiple genomes.

To start work: Check the Quick Start Tutorials (well worth 5 minutes) or just dive in by selecting a tool from the menu. Our usual starting place is the VOCs, which allows you to select data for use with the analysis tools.

 

Baculovirus information

The VBRC provides a Baculovirus Information Book that includes:

  • Up-to-date website links to collections of published research reviews through NCBI.
  • The manually curated VBRC KnowledgeBase (detailed experimental evidence about the biology of the viral genes and proteins).
  • Links to other baculovirus internet resources for general and background information.
  • List of sequenced baculovirus genomes    For analysis of genomes, please use the VOCs tool; this also provides a list of genomes and the number in the VOCs database.