GBRAP: A Comprehensive Database and Tool for Exploring Genomic Diversity Across All Domains of Life.

Abstract

Evolutionary studies require extensive examination of genomic information across all domains of life. Despite the availability of a large number of genomes through GenBank, the effective visualisation or comparison of the information they contain is challenging due to many reasons, including their size. We introduce GBRAP, a comprehensive software tool to analyse genome files, and an online database housing an extensive collection of carefully curated, high-quality genome statistics for all the organisms available in the RefSeq database of NCBI. Users can either directly search, or select from pre-categorized groups, the organisms of their choice and retrieve data, the output is generated as tables containing more than 200 columns of useful genomic information (Base counts, GC content, Shannon Entropy, Codon Usage etc.) separately calculated for different genomic elements (eg. CDS, Introns, tRNA, rRNA, ncRNA, etc.). The data are independently displayed (if applicable) for each chromosomal, mitochondrial, plastid, or plasmid sequence. All the data can be visualised on the database or downloaded as CSV or Excel files. The GBRAP database is free to access without any registration and is publicly available at http://tacclab.org/gbrap/.