THE TRANSLATIONAL TERMINATION SIGNAL DATABASE (TRANSTERM) NOW ALSO INCLUDES INITIATION CONTEXTS

The TransTerm database of termination codon contexts has been extended to include sense codon usage, and initiation codon contexts. The data base was constructed from 23,721 coding sequences from 93 organisms. T he database contains: a) the sequence around the termination codon (-1 0, +10); b) the sequence around the initiation codon (-20, +10); c) th e length,'G+C%' of the third position of codons (GC3), the 'codon adap tation index' (CAI) and the 'effective number of codons' statistic (Nc ); d) summary tables for each organism including total codon usage, st op codon and tetranucleotide stop-signal usage, and matrices tallying base frequencies at each position around the initiation and terminatio n codons. The data are arranged to facilitate investigation of the rel ationships between the three phases of protein synthesis. The database is available electronically from EMBL.