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MITE, TRIM and SINEs are miniature form transposable elements (mTEs) that are ubiquitous and dispersed throughout entire plant genomes. Tens of thousands of members cause insertion polymorphism at both the inter- and intra- species level. Therefore, mTEs are valuable targets and resources for development of markers that can be utilized for breeding, genetic diversity and genome evolution studies. Taking advantage of the completely sequenced genomes of Brassica rapa and B. oleracea, characterization of mTEs and building a curated database are prerequisite to extending their utilization for genomics and applied fields in Brassica crops. We have developed BrassicaTED as a unique web portal containing detailed characterization information for mTEs of Brassica species. At present, BrassicaTED has datasets for 41 mTE families, including 5894 and 6026 members from 20 MITE families, 1393 and 1639 members from 5 TRIM families, 1270 and 2364 members from 16 SINE families in B. rapa and B. oleracea, respectively. BrassicaTED offers different sections to browse structural and positional characteristics for every mTE family. In addition, we have added data on 289 MITE insertion polymorphisms from a survey of seven Brassica relatives. Genes with internal mTE insertions are shown with detailed gene annotation and microarray-based comparative gene expression data in comparison with their paralogs in the triplicated B. rapa genome. This database also includes a novel tool, K BLAST (Karyotype BLAST), for clear visualization of the locations for each member in the B. rapa and B. oleracea pseudo-genome sequences. BrassicaTED is a newly developed database of information regarding the characteristics and potential utility of mTEs including MITE, TRIM and SINEs in B. rapa and B. oleracea. The database will promote the development of desirable mTE-based markers, which can be utilized for genomics and breeding in Brassica species. BrassicaTED will be a valuable repository for scientists and breeders, promoting efficient research on Brassica species. BrassicaTED can be accessed at http://im-crop.snu.ac.kr/BrassicaTED/index.php .

Background Recently, various evolution-related journals adopted policies to encourage or require archiving of phylogenetic trees and associated data. Such attention to practices that promote sharing of data reflects rapidly improving information technology, and rapidly expanding potential to use this technology to aggregate and link data from previously published research. Nevertheless, little is known about current practices, or best practices, for publishing trees and associated data so as to promote re-use. Findings Here we summarize results of an ongoing analysis of current practices for archiving phylogenetic trees and associated data, current practices of re-use, and current barriers to re-use. We find that the technical infrastructure is available to support rudimentary archiving, but the frequency of archiving is low. Currently, most phylogenetic knowledge is not easily re-used due to a lack of archiving, lack of awareness of best practices, and lack of community-wide standards for formatting data, naming entities, and annotating data. Most attempts at data re-use seem to end in disappointment. Nevertheless, we find many positive examples of data re-use, particularly those that involve customized species trees generated by grafting to, and pruning from, a much larger tree. Conclusions The technologies and practices that facilitate data re-use can catalyze synthetic and integrative research. However, success will require engagement from various stakeholders including individual scientists who produce or consume shareable data, publishers, policy-makers, technology developers and resource-providers. The critical challenges for facilitating re-use of phylogenetic trees and associated data, we suggest, include: a broader commitment to public archiving; more extensive use of globally meaningful identifiers; development of user-friendly technology for annotating, submitting, searching, and retrieving data and their metadata; and development of a minimum reporting standard (MIAPA) indicating which kinds of data and metadata are most important for a re-useable phylogenetic record.

Background Renal cell carcinoma or RCC is one of the common and most lethal urological cancers, with 40% of the patients succumbing to death because of metastatic progression of the disease. Treatment of metastatic RCC remains highly challenging because of its resistance to chemotherapy as well as radiotherapy, besides surgical resection. Whereas RCC comprises tumors with differing histological types, clear cell RCC remains the most common. A major problem in the clinical management of patients presenting with localized ccRCC is the inability to determine tumor aggressiveness and accurately predict the risk of metastasis following surgery. As a measure to improve the diagnosis and prognosis of RCC, researchers have identified several molecular markers through a number of techniques. However the wealth of information available is scattered in literature and not easily amenable to data-mining. To reduce this gap, this work describes a comprehensive repository called Renal Cancer Gene Database, as an integrated gateway to study renal cancer related data. Findings Renal Cancer Gene Database is a manually curated compendium of 240 protein-coding and 269 miRNA genes contributing to the etiology and pathogenesis of various forms of renal cell carcinomas. The protein coding genes have been classified according to the kind of gene alteration observed in RCC. RCDB also includes the miRNAsdysregulated in RCC, along with the corresponding information regarding the type of RCC and/or metastatic or prognostic significance. While some of the miRNA genes showed an association with other types of cancers few were unique to RCC. Users can query the database using keywords, category and chromosomal location of the genes. The knowledgebase can be freely accessed via a user-friendly web interface at http://www.juit.ac.in/attachments/jsr/rcdb/homenew.html. Conclusions It is hoped that this database would serve as a useful complement to the existing public resources and as a good starting point for researchers and physicians interested in RCC genetics.

We present a genome assembly from an individual female Melitaea athalia (also known as Mellicta athalia; the heath fritillary; Arthropoda; Insecta; Lepidoptera; Nymphalidae). The genome sequence is 610 megabases in span. In total, 99.98% of the assembly is scaffolded into 32 chromosomal pseudomolecules, with the W and Z sex chromosome assembled. Gene annotation of this assembly on Ensembl has identified 12,824 protein coding genes.

Depression is a leading cause of disability and is associated with a number of adverse offspring outcomes with it occurs in parents. Depression is present in men and women at different rates, and recent research suggests that symptom profiles between the sexes may differ. Longitudinal data are needed to answer remaining questions about the long-term course, gender differences, antecedents and outcomes of depression. The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) is a large birth cohort study in England which administered one of the most commonly used depression instruments, the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) at 11 timepoints in mothers and at 10 timepoints in their partners. In addition to repeated measurements of the EPDS, ALSPAC has a wealth of participant data on biological, social, demographic, and lifestyle factors. The purpose of this data note is to introduce potential users of the data to the characteristics of the EPDS in ALSPAC, as well as some key considerations when using the data.

Clonorchiasis, which is primarily caused by liver fluke (Platyhelminthes), is a fatal infectious disease that is mainly associated with bile duct malignancy and the subsequent development of cholangiocarcinoma. Thus, a genomic approach now represents an important step to further our knowledge of biology and the pathology of these parasites. The results of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) sequencing need to be well organized into databases to provide an integrated set of tools and functional information. Here, the ClonorESTdb database represents a collection of Clonorchis sinensis ESTs that is intended as a resource for parasite functional genomics. A total of 55,736 successful EST sequences, which are cleaned and clustered into non-redundant 13,305 C. sinensis assembled EST sequences (6,497 clusters and 6,808 singletons), were obtained from three in-house prepared cDNA libraries of C. sinensis at different developmental stages. The assembled consensus sequences were annotated using the BLAST algorithm or/and hmm against NCBI NR, UniProt, KEGG and InterProScan. The ClonorESTdb database provides functional annotation, their expression profiles, tandem repeats and putative single nucleotide polymorphisms with utility tools such as local BLAST search and text retrieval. This resource enables the researcher to identify and compare expression signatures under different biological stages and promotes ongoing parasite drug and vaccine development and biological research. Database URL: http://pathod.cdc.go.kr/clonorestdb/

Background Protein Post-Translational Modification (PTM) plays an essential role in cellular control mechanisms that adjust protein physical and chemical properties, folding, conformation, stability and activity, thus also altering protein function. Findings dbPTM (version 1.0), which was developed previously, aimed on a comprehensive collection of protein post-translational modifications. In this update version (dbPTM2.0), we developed a PTM database towards an expert system of protein post-translational modifications. The database comprehensively collects experimental and predictive protein PTM sites. In addition, dbPTM2.0 was extended to a knowledge base comprising the modified sites, solvent accessibility of substrate, protein secondary and tertiary structures, protein domains, protein intrinsic disorder region, and protein variations. Moreover, this work compiles a benchmark to construct evaluation datasets for computational study to identifying PTM sites, such as phosphorylated sites, glycosylated sites, acetylated sites and methylated sites. Conclusion The current release not only provides the sequence-based information, but also annotates the structure-based information for protein post-translational modification. The interface is also designed to facilitate the access to the resource. This effective database is now freely accessible at http://dbPTM.mbc.nctu.edu.tw/.

Background As more and more genomes are being sequenced, an overview of their genomic features and annotation of their functional elements, which control the expression of each gene or transcription unit of the genome, is a fundamental challenge in genomics and bioinformatics. Findings Relative stability of DNA sequence has been used to predict promoter regions in 913 microbial genomic sequences with GC-content ranging from 16.6% to 74.9%. Irrespective of the genome GC-content the relative stability based promoter prediction method has already been proven to be robust in terms of recall and precision. The predicted promoter regions for the 913 microbial genomes have been accumulated in a database called PromBase. Promoter search can be carried out in PromBase either by specifying the gene name or the genomic position. Each predicted promoter region has been assigned to a reliability class (low, medium, high, very high and highest) based on the difference between its average free energy and the downstream region. The recall and precision values for each class are shown graphically in PromBase. In addition, PromBase provides detailed information about base composition, CDS and CG/TA skews for each genome and various DNA sequence dependent structural properties (average free energy, curvature and bendability) in the vicinity of all annotated translation start sites (TLS). Conclusion PromBase is a database, which contains predicted promoter regions and detailed analysis of various genomic features for 913 microbial genomes. PromBase can serve as a valuable resource for comparative genomics study and help the experimentalist to rapidly access detailed information on various genomic features and putative promoter regions in any given genome. This database is freely accessible for academic and non- academic users via the worldwide web http://nucleix.mbu.iisc.ernet.in/prombase/.

We would like to share data from a survey run by the Young Academy of Europe (YAE) from June to October 2020, with questions aiming to unravel the situation of early-career researchers (including early stage group leaders) working in Europe, during the COVID-19 pandemic. We were particularly interested in the impact of care activities (related to young children or other family members), and the impact of gender. We include the online survey and collected data, without identifying information. The survey is published in Nature Career Column (July, 2021) (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01952-6).

Background Flow cytometry is a widely used analytical technique for examining microscopic particles, such as cells. The Flow Cytometry Standard (FCS) was developed in 1984 for storing flow data and it is supported by all instrument and third party software vendors. However, FCS does not capture the full scope of flow cytometry (FCM)-related data and metadata, and data standards have recently been developed to address this shortcoming. Findings The Data Standards Task Force (DSTF) of the International Society for the Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC) has developed several data standards to complement the raw data encoded in FCS files. Efforts started with the Minimum Information about a Flow Cytometry Experiment, a minimal data reporting standard of details necessary to include when publishing FCM experiments to facilitate third party understanding. MIFlowCyt is now being recommended to authors by publishers as part of manuscript submission, and manuscripts are being checked by reviewers and editors for compliance. Gating-ML was then introduced to capture gating descriptions - an essential part of FCM data analysis describing the selection of cell populations of interest. The Classification Results File Format was developed to accommodate results of the gating process, mostly within the context of automated clustering. Additionally, the Archival Cytometry Standard bundles data with all the other components describing experiments. Here, we introduce these recent standards and provide the very first example of how they can be used to report FCM data including analysis and results in a standardized, computationally exchangeable form. Conclusions Reporting standards and open file formats are essential for scientific collaboration and independent validation. The recently developed FCM data standards are now being incorporated into third party software tools and data repositories, which will ultimately facilitate understanding and data reuse.

Background Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar L.) is an environmentally and economically important organism and its gene content is reasonably well characterized. From a transcriptional standpoint, it is important to characterize the changes in gene expression over the course of unperturbed early development, from fertilization through to the parr stage. Findings S. salar samples were taken at 17 time points from 2 to 89 days post fertilization. Total RNA was extracted and cRNA was synthesized and hybridized to a newly developed 44K oligo salmonid microarray platform. Quantified results were subjected to preliminary data analysis and submitted to NCBI's Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). Data can be found under the GEO accession number GSE25938. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE25938 Conclusions Throughout the entire period of development, several thousand genes were found to be differentially regulated. This work represents the trancriptional characterization of a very large geneset that will be extremely valuable in further examination of the transcriptional changes in Atlantic salmon during the first few months of development. The expression profiles can help to annotate salmon genes in addition to being used as references against any number of experimental variables to which developing salmonids might be subjected.