Alternative splicing is an important regulatory mechanism of mammalian gene expression. The alternative splicing database (ASD) consortium is systematically collecting and annotating data on alternative splicing. We present the continuation and upgrade of the ASD [T. A. Thanaraj, S. Stamm, F. Clark, J. J. Riethoven, V. Le Texier, J. Muilu (2004) Nucleic Acids Res. 32, D64–D69] that consists of computationally and manually generated data. Its largest parts are AltSplice, a value-added database of computationally delineated alternative splicing events. Its data include alternatively spliced introns/exons, events, isoform splicing patterns and isoform peptide sequences. AltSplice data are generated by examining gene-transcript alignments. The data are annotated for various biological features including splicing signals, expression states, (SNP)-mediated splicing and cross-species conservation. AEdb forms the manually curated component of ASD. It is a literature-based data set containing sequence and properties of alternatively spliced exons, functional enumeration of observed splicing events, characterization of observed splicing regulatory elements, and a collection of experimentally clarified minigene constructs. ASD includes a workbench, which is an analysis tool that enables users to carry out splicing related analysis such as characterization of introns for various splicing signals, identification of splicing regulatory elements on a given RNA sequence, prediction of putative exons and prediction of putative translation start codons. The different ASD modules are integrated and can be accessed through user-friendly interfaces and visualization tools. ASD data has been integrated with Ensembl genome annotation project as a Distributed Annotation System (DAS) resource and can be viewed on Ensembl genome browser. The ASD resource is presented at ().

The Alternative Splicing and Transcript Diversity database (ASTD) gives access to a vast collection of alternative transcripts that integrate transcription initiation, polyadenylation and splicing variant data. Alternative transcripts are derived from the mapping of transcribed sequences to the complete human, mouse and rat genomes using an extension of the computational pipeline developed for the ASD (Alternative Splicing Database) and ATD (Alternative Transcript Diversity) databases, which are now superseded by ASTD. For the human genome, ASTD identifies splicing variants, transcription initiation variants and polyadenylation variants in 68%, 68% and 62% of the gene set, respectively, consistent with current estimates for transcription variation. Users can access ASTD through a variety of browsing and query tools, including expression state-based queries for the identification of tissue-specific isoforms. Participating laboratories have experimentally validated a subset of ASTD-predicted alternative splice forms and alternative polyadenylation forms that were not previously reported. The ASTD database can be accessed at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/astd.

BackgroundOcimum sanctum L. (O. tenuiflorum) family-Lamiaceae is an important component of Indian tradition of medicine as well as culture around the world, and hence is known as “Holy basil” in India. This plant is mentioned in the ancient texts of Ayurveda as an “elixir of life” (life saving) herb and worshipped for over 3000 years due to its healing properties. Although used in various ailments, validation of molecules for differential activities is yet to be fully analyzed, as about 80 % of the patents on this plant are on extracts or the plant parts, and mainly focussed on essential oil components. With a view to understand the full metabolic potential of this plant whole nuclear and chloroplast genomes were sequenced for the first time combining the sequence data from 4 libraries and three NGS platforms.ResultsThe saturated draft assembly of the genome was about 386 Mb, along with the plastid genome of 142,245 bp, turning out to be the smallest in Lamiaceae. In addition to SSR markers, 136 proteins were identified as homologous to five important plant genomes. Pathway analysis indicated an abundance of phenylpropanoids in O. sanctum. Phylogenetic analysis for chloroplast proteome placed Salvia miltiorrhiza as the nearest neighbor. Comparison of the chemical compounds and genes availability in O. sanctum and S. miltiorrhiza indicated the potential for the discovery of new active molecules.ConclusionThe genome sequence and annotation of O. sanctum provides new insights into the function of genes and the medicinal nature of the metabolites synthesized in this plant. This information is highly beneficial for mining biosynthetic pathways for important metabolites in related species.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12864-015-1640-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Background: The three major mechanisms that regulate transcript formation involve the selection of alternative sites for transcription start (TS), splicing, and polyadenylation. Currently there are efforts that collect data & annotation individually for each of these variants. It is important to take an integrated view of these data sets and to derive a data set of alternate transcripts along with consolidated annotation. We have been developing in the past computational pipelines that generate value-added data at genome-scale on individual variant types; these include AltSplice on splicing and AltPAS on polyadenylation. We now extend these pipelines and integrate the resultant data sets to facilitate an integrated view of the contributions from splicing and polyadenylation in the formation of transcript variants.