Viral Bioinformatics Research Centre

Chris Upton, University of Victoria, Canada

Herpesviridae

Herpesviridae

The herpesvirus database is not currently being actively maintained.  Please contact us if you have a project needing a herpesvirus resource.
Herpesviridae are a family of enveloped viruses infecting vertebrates. Subfamilies, based on biological characteristics, include: Alphaherpesvirinae, Betaherpesvirinae and Gammaherpesvirinae. Virions contain one molecule of linear double stranded DNA. Total genome length is 120000-220000 nucleotides long.

 

Herpesviruses 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 “Herpesviridae Tools” drop-down menu on the top left of this page. These tools include:
  • Viral Orthologous Clusters (VOCs) allows users to easily search the Herpesviridae 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.


Herpesvirus information

The VBRC provides a Herpesvirus 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 herpesvirus internet resources for general and background information.