Yongjie Liang

University of Alberta | UAlberta

PHAST (PHAge Search Tool) and its successor PHASTER (PHAge Search Tool - Enhanced Release) have become two of the most widely used web servers for identifying putative prophages in bacterial genomes. Here we review the main capabilities of these web resources, provide some practical guidance regarding their use and discuss possible future improveme...

Heatmapper is a freely available web server that allows users to interactively visualize their data in the form of heat maps through an easy-to-use graphical interface. Unlike existing non-commercial heat map packages, which either lack graphical interfaces or are specialized for only one or two kinds of heat maps, Heatmapper is a versatile tool th...

PHASTER (PHAge Search Tool – Enhanced Release) is a significant upgrade to the popular PHAST web server for the rapid identification and annotation of prophage sequences within bacterial genomes and plasmids. Although the steps in the phage identification pipeline in PHASTER remain largely the same as in the original PHAST, numerous software improv...

Over the past decade, a number of methods have been developed to determine the approximate structure of proteins using minimal NMR experimental information such as chemical shifts alone, sparse NOEs alone or a combination of comparative modeling data and chemical shifts. However, there have been relatively few methods that allow these approximate m...

Since this book was originally published in 2007 there has been a significant increase in the number of Salmonella bacteriophages, particularly lytic virus, and Salmonella strains which have been fully sequenced. In addition, new insights into phage taxonomy have resulted in new phage genera, some of which have been recognized by the International...

PathWhiz (http://smpdb.ca/pathwhiz) is a web server designed to create colourful, visually pleasing and biologically accurate pathway diagrams that are both machine-readable and interactive. As a web server, PathWhiz is accessible from almost any place and compatible with essentially any operating system. It also houses a public library of pathways...

PolySearch2 (http://polysearch.ca) is an online text-mining system for identifying relationships between biomedical entities such as human diseases, genes, SNPs, proteins, drugs, metabolites, toxins, metabolic pathways, organs, tissues, subcellular organelles, positive health effects, negative health effects, drug actions, Gene Ontology terms, MeSH...

The exposome is defined as the totality of all human environmental exposures from conception to death. It is often regarded as the complement to the genome, with the interaction between the exposome and the genome ultimately determining one's phenotype. The 'toxic exposome' is the complete collection of chronically or acutely toxic compounds to whi...

The Small Molecule Pathway Database (SMPDB, http://www.smpdb.ca) is a comprehensive, colorful, fully searchable and highly interactive database for visualizing human metabolic, drug action, drug metabolism, physiological activity and metabolic disease pathways. SMPDB contains >600 pathways with nearly 75% of its pathways not found in any other data...

Characterization of prophages in sequenced bacterial genomes is important for virulence assessment, evolutionary analysis, and phage application development. The objective of this study was to identify complete, inducible prophages in the cystic fibrosis (CF) clinical isolate Burkholderia cenocepacia H111. Using the prophage-finding program PHAge S...

In protein X-ray crystallography, resolution is often used as a good indicator of structural quality. Diffraction resolution of protein crystals correlates well with the number of X-ray observables that are used in structure generation and, therefore, with protein coordinate errors. In protein NMR, there is no parameter identical to X-ray resolutio...

Originally released in 2005, BacMap is an electronic, interactive atlas of fully sequenced bacterial genomes. It contains fully labeled, zoomable and searchable chromosome maps for essentially all sequenced prokaryotic (archaebacterial and eubacterial) species. Each map can be zoomed to the level of individual genes and each gene is hyperlinked to...

PHAge Search Tool (PHAST) is a web server designed to rapidly and accurately identify, annotate and graphically display prophage sequences within bacterial genomes or plasmids. It accepts either raw DNA sequence data or partially annotated GenBank formatted data and rapidly performs a number of database comparisons as well as phage ‘cornerstone’ fe...

PROSESS (PROtein Structure Evaluation Suite and Server) is a web server designed to evaluate and validate protein structures generated by X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy or computational modeling. While many structure evaluation packages have been developed over the past 20 years, PROSESS is unique in its comprehensiveness, its capacity to...

The Small Molecule Pathway Database (SMPDB) is an interactive, visual database containing more than 350 small-molecule pathways found in humans. More than 2/3 of these pathways (>280) are not found in any other pathway database. SMPDB is designed specifically to support pathway elucidation and pathway discovery in clinical metabolomics, transcripto...