IMGT-ONTOLOGY and IMGT databases, tools and Web resources for immunogenetics and immunoinformatics

The international ImMunoGeneTics information system (IMGT; http://imgt.cines.fr), is a high quality integrated information system specialized in immunoglobulins (IG), T cell receptors (TR), major histocompatibility complex (MHC), and related proteins of the immune system (RPI) of human and other vertebrates, created in 1989, by the Laboratoire d'ImmunoGénétique Moléculaire (LIGM; Université Montpellier II and CNRS) at Montpellier, France. IMGT provides a common access to standardized data which include nucleotide and protein sequences, oligonucleotide primers, gene maps, genetic polymorphisms, specificities, 2D and 3D structures. IMGT consists of several sequence databases (IMGT/LIGM-DB, IMGT/MHC-DB, IMGT/PRIMER-DB), one genome database (IMGT/GENE-DB) and one 3D structure database (IMGT/3Dstructure-DB), interactive tools for sequence analysis (IMGT/V-QUEST, IMGT/JunctionAnalysis, IMGT/PhyloGene, IMGT/Allele-Align), for genome analysis (IMGT/GeneSearch, IMGT/GeneView, IMGT/LocusView) and for 3D structure analysis (IMGT/StructuralQuery), and Web resources ("IMGT Marie-Paule page") comprising 8000 HTML pages. IMGT other accesses include SRS, FTP, search by BLAST, etc. By its high quality and its easy data distribution, IMGT has important implications in medical research (repertoire in autoimmune diseases, AIDS, leukemias, lymphomas, myelomas), veterinary research, genome diversity and genome evolution studies of the adaptive immune responses, biotechnology related to antibody engineering (single chain Fragment variable (scFv), phage displays, combinatorial libraries) and therapeutical approaches (grafts, immunotherapy). IMGT is freely available at http://imgt.cines.fr.