UPDATE OF MMTDB - A METAZOA MITOCHONDRIAL-DNA VARIANTS DATABASE

The present paper describes the improvements in MmtDB, a specialised d atabase designed to collect Metazoa mitochondrial DNA variants, Priori ty in the data collection has been given to Metazoa for which a large amount of variants is available, e.g., for humans, Starting from the s equences available in the Nucleotide Sequence Databases, the redundant sequences have been removed and new sequences from other sources have been added, Value-added information is associated to each variant seq uence, e.g., analysed region, experimental method, tissue and cell lin es, population data, sex, age, family code and information about the v ariation events (nucleotide position, involved gene, restriction site gain or loss), Cross-references are introduced to the EMBL Data Librar y, as well as an internal cross-referencing among MmtDB entries accord ing to tissual, heteroplasmic, familiar and aplo-typical correlation, Furthermore MmtDB has a new section, AMmtDB: Aligned Metazoan mitochon drial biosequences, MmtDB can be accessed through the World Wide Web a t URL http://WWW.ba.cnr.it/similar to areamt08/MmtDBWWW.htm.