Transterm: a database of messenger RNA components and signals

Transterm facilitates studies of messenger RNAs and translational control signals. Each messenger RNA (mRNA) from GenBank is extracted and broken into its functional components, its coding sequence, initiation context, termination context, flanking sequence representing its 5' UTR (untranslated region), 3' UTR and translational signals. In addition, numerical parameters characterising each coding region in Transterm, including codon and GC bias, are available. For each species in Transterm, the initiation and termination regions are aligned by their start or stop codons and presented as base frequency matrices and tables of the information content of the bases in the alignments. Users can obtain summaries of characteristics of the mRNAs for species of their choice and search for translational signals both in the Transterm database and in their own sequence. The current release contains data from over 10 000 species, including the complete genomes of 20 prokaryotes and three eukaryotes. Both flat-file and relational database forms of Transterm are accessible via the WWW at http://biochem.otago.ac.nz/Transterm/