A web-based platform of nucleotide sequence alignments of plants

In recent years, a large number of nucleotide sequences have become available for plant species by the advent of massive parallel sequencing. The use of genomic data has been important for agriculture, food science, medicine or ecology. Despite the increasing amount of data, nucleotide sequences are usually available in public databases as isolated records with some descriptive information. Researchers interested in studying a wide range of specific plant families are forced to do multiple searches, sequence downloads, data curation and sequence alignments. In order to help researches overcoming these problems, we have built a comprehensive on-line resource of curated nucleotide sequence alignments for plant research, named PlantAligDB (available at http://plantaligdb.portugene.com). The latest release incorporates 514 alignments with a total of 66,052 sequences from six important genomic regions: atpF-atpH, psbA-trnH, trnL, rbcL, matK and ITS. The alignments represent 223 plant families from a variety of taxonomic groups. The users can quickly search the database, download and visualize the curated alignments and phylogenetic trees using dynamic browser-based applications. Different measures of genetic diversity are also available for each plant family. We also provide the workflow script that allows the user to do the curation process, explaining the steps involved. Overall, the PlantAligDB provides a complete, quality checked and regularly updated collection of alignments that can be used in taxonomic, DNA barcoding, molecular genetics, phylogenetic and evolutionary studies.