UTRdb: a specialized database of 5 ' and 3 ' untranslated regions of eukaryotic mRNAs

The 5' and 3' untranslated regions of eukaryotic mRNAs may play a crucial r ole in the regulation of gene expression controlling mRNA localization, sta bility and translational efficiency. For this reason we developed UTRdb (ht tp://bigarea.area,ba.cnr.it:8000/BioWWW/#UTRdb), a specialized database of 5' and 3' untranslated sequences of eukaryotic mRNAs cleaned from redundanc y. UTRdb entries are enriched with specialized information not present in t he primary databases including the presence of nucleotide sequence patterns already demonstrated by experimental analysis to have some functional role . All these patterns have been collected in the UTRsite database so that it is possible to search any input sequence for the presence of annotated fun ctional motifs, Furthermore, UTRdb entries have been annotated for the pres ence of repetitive elements.