About Virus World

The Virus World database (VWdb) is a new database of all the characterized viruses, which include both enveloped and nonenveloped viruses, available to date at NCBI database along with the associated metadata on virus taxonomy, genome type, coat protein sequences. We have used the ICTV (International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses) approved family/genus classification of viruses. All this information (data) is stored in an independent MySQL database, separate from VIPERdb. Currently there are 181,476 identified viruses from 158 families and 1038 genera available in the VWdb.
Once a family is selected from the pulldown menu of the Virus World Family Tree application (VW-FTA), various genera and individual viruses in the family are shown in the form of a tree representation. The nodes associated with genera can be collapsed to view only specific genera of interest. Going forward we will also provide an option to generate the trees according to the genus of choice. Once you click on a virus of interest, an info_page for the virus is generated with the details of virus taxonomy and a.a. sequence of the CP that can be downloaded in FASTA format. We also included a link to the corresponding entry in the UniProt database. Furthermore, if a structure is available for the chosen virus, hyperlinks are provided to the corresponding entries in VIPERdb and PDB. Significantly, the ”Proteome” button provides a list of all the proteins associated with the virus (e.g., CP, RDRP, Movement proteins) and their details. There are currently ~5 million virus related proteome sequences stored in the VWdb. We are very optimistic about the future improvements to VWdb and the interplay between VIPERdb and VWdb.