MicrobeDB: a locally maintainable database of microbial genomic sequences by Morgan G. I. Langille, Matthew R. Laird, William W. L. Hsiao, Terry A. Chiu, Jonathan A. Eisen, and Fiona S. L. Brinkman. (Bioinformatics (2012) 28 (14): 1947-1948. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bts273)
Abstract
Summary: Analysis of microbial genomes often requires the general organization and comparison of tens to thousands of genomes both from public repositories and unpublished sources. MicrobeDB provides a foundation for such projects by the automation of downloading published, completed bacterial and archaeal genomes from key sources, parsing annotations of all genomes (both public and private) into a local database, and allowing interaction with the database through an easy to use programming interface. MicrobeDB creates a simple to use, easy to maintain, centralized local resource for various large-scale comparative genomic analyses and a back-end for future microbial application design.
Availability: MicrobeDB is freely available under the GNU-GPL at: http://github.com/mlangill/microbedb/
No doubt a useful project but the article seems to be at war with itself:
Although many of these centers provide genomic data in a variety of static formats such as Genbank and Fasta, these are often inadequate for complex queries. To carry out these analyses efficiently, a relational database such as MySQL (http://mysql.com) can be used to allow rapid querying across many genomes at once. Some existing data providers such as CMR allow downloading of their database files directly, but these databases are designed for large web-based infrastructures and contain numerous tables that demand a steep learning curve. Also, addition of unpublished genomes to these databases is often not supported. A well known and widely used system is the Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD) project (http://gmod.org). GMOD is an open-source project that provides a common platform for building model organism databases such as FlyBase (McQuilton et al., 2011) and WormBase (Yook et al., 2011). GMOD supports a variety of options such as GBrowse (Stein et al., 2002) and a variety of database choices including Chado (Mungall and Emmert, 2007) and BioSQL (http://biosql.org). GMOD provides a comprehensive system, but for many researchers such a complex system is not needed.
On one hand, current solutions are “…often inadequate for complex queries” and just a few lines later, “…such a complex system is not needed.”
I have no doubt that using unfamiliar and complex table structures is a burden on any user. Not to mention lacking the ability to add “unpublished genomes” or fixing versions of data for analysis.
What concerns me is the “solution” being seen as yet another set of “local” options. Which impedes the future use of the now “localized” data.
The issue raised here need to be addressed but one-off solutions seem like a particularly poor choice.
[…] MicrobeDB: a locally maintainable database of microbial genomic sequences by Morgan G. I. Langille, Matthew R. Laird, William W. L. Hsiao, Terry A. Chiu, Jonathan A. Eisen, and Fiona S. L. Brinkman. (Bioinformatics (2012) … […]
Pingback by MicrobeDB: a locally maintainable database of microbial genomic ... | Databases & Softwares | Scoop.it — July 9, 2012 @ 10:00 am