UTRDB - A SPECIALIZED DATABASE OF 5'-UNTRANSLATED AND 3'-UNTRANSLATEDREGIONS OF EUKARYOTIC MESSENGER-RNAS

The important role the untranslated regions of eukaryotic mRNAs may pl ay in gene regulation and expression is now widely acknowledged. For t his reason we developed UTRdb, a specialized database of 5'- and 3'-un translated sequences of eukaryotic mRNAs cleaned from redundancy. UTRd b entries are enriched with specialized information not present in the primary databases, including the presence of functional patterns alre ady demonstrated by experimental analysis to have some functional role , A collection of such patterns is being collected in UTRsite database (http://bio-www.ba.cnr.it:8000/srs5/) which can also be used with app ropriate computational tools to detect known functional patterns conta ined in mRNA untranslated regions.