The MicrobesOnline Web site for comparative genomics

At present, hundreds of microbial genomes have been sequenced, and hundreds more are currently in the pipeline. The Virtual Institute for Microbial Stress and Survival has developed a publicly available suite of Web-based comparative genomic tools (http://www.microbesonline.org) designed to facilitate multispecies comparison among prokaryotes. Highlights of the MicrobesOnline Web site include operon and regulon predictions, a multispecies genome browser, a multispecies Gene Ontology browser, a comparative KEGG metabolic pathway viewer, a Bioinformatics Workbench for in-depth sequence analysis, and Gene Carts that allow users to save genes of interest for further study while they browse. In addition, we provide an interface for genome annotation, which like all of the tools reported here, is freely available to the scientific community.