Fungrep 1.0: Online Web-Repository Of Microsatellite Repeats From Fungal Genomes

Microsatellites are tandem repetitions of short DNA motifs found in genomes of all organisms. They have been significantly used in DNA fingerprinting, genome mapping, DNA forensics, linkage analysis, genetic disease studies, are known to be involved in gene regulation, bacterial adaptation, genome evolution and are extensively used as genetic markers. Microsatellites have been used as primers for genotyping of fungal strains, to study the evolution of fungal genomes as well as in the epidemiological studies of fungal pathogens. However, the distribution, frequency and abundance of microsatellites in several fungal genomes is not well studied. So, we have constructed an exclusive database of fungal microsatellites and a user-friendly web-interface to analyse the distribution and abundance of these repeats. FungREP currently hosts microsatellite data of 910 sequences of 44 different fungi that includes complete genome sequences, whole genome shotgun sequences and contigs. More than 10 million perfect and imperfect microsatellites and their corresponding information such as the repeat unit, position information, repeat statistics, protein information, etc., can be accessed from the first version of FungREP1.0. The database can be accessed for free from www.mcr.org.in/fungrep