Summary: Visualizing genes’ structure and annotated features helps biologists to investigate their function and evolution intuitively. The Gene Structure Display Server (GSDS) has been widely used by more than 60 000 users since its first publication in 2007. Here, we reported the upgraded GSDS 2.0 with a newly designed interface, supports for more types of annotation features and formats, as well as an integrated visual editor for editing the generated figure. Moreover, a user-specified phylogenetic tree can be added to facilitate further evolutionary analysis. The full source code is also available for downloading.Availability and implementation: Web server and source code are freely available at http://gsds.cbi.pku.edu.cn.Contact: gaog@mail.cbi.pku.edu.cn or gsds@mail.cbi.pku.edu.cnSupplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

With the aim to provide a resource for functional and evolutionary study of plant transcription factors (TFs), we updated the plant TF database PlantTFDB to version 3.0 (http://planttfdb.cbi.pku.edu.cn). After refining the TF classification pipeline, we systematically identified 129 288 TFs from 83 species, of which 67 species have genome sequences, covering main lineages of green plants. Besides the abundant annotation provided in the previous version, we generated more annotations for identified TFs, including expression, regulation, interaction, conserved elements, phenotype information, expert-curated descriptions derived from UniProt, TAIR and NCBI GeneRIF, as well as references to provide clues for functional studies of TFs. To help identify evolutionary relationship among identified TFs, we assigned 69 450 TFs into 3924 orthologous groups, and constructed 9217 phylogenetic trees for TFs within the same families or same orthologous groups, respectively. In addition, we set up a TF prediction server in this version for users to identify TFs from their own sequences.

We developed a web server GSDS (Gene Structure Display Server) for drawing gene structure schematic diagrams. Users can submit three types of dataCDS and genomic sequences, NCBI GenBank accession numbers or GIs, exon positions on a gene. GSDS uses this information to obtain the gene structure and draw diagram for it. Users can also designate some special regions to mark on the gene structure diagram. The output result will be PNG or SVG format picture. The corresponding sequence will be shown in a new window by clicking the picture in PNG format. A Chinese version for the main page is also built. The GSDS is available on http://gsds.cbi.pku.edu.cn/.