The Enhanced Microbial Genomes Library

Since the obtention of the complete sequence of Haemophilus influenzae Rd i n 1995, the number of bacterial genomes entirely sequenced has regularly in creased. A problem is that the quality of the annotations of these very lar ge sequences is usually lower than those of the shorter entries encountered in the repository collections, Moreover, classical sequence database manag ement systems have difficulties in handling entries of that size. In this c ontext, we have decided to build the Enhanced Microbial Genomes Library (EM GLib) in which these two problems are alleviated. This library contains all the complete genomes from bacteria already sequenced and the yeast genome in GenBank format. The annotations are improved by the introduction of data on codon usage, gene orientation on the chromosome and gene families. It i s possible to access EMGLib through two database systems set up on World Wi de Web servers: the PBIL server at http://pbil.univ-lyon1.fr/emglib/emglib. html and the MICADO server at http://locus.jouy.inra.fr/micado.