Plant virus database (PVirDB)

This is a custom-built blast database of higher plant viruses and viroids.

A challenge associated with the bioinformatics analysis of sequencing data for diagnostic purposes is the dependency on sequence databases for taxonomic assignment of detection. Although public databases such as the GenBank database maintained at NCBI are the most up to date, the enormous nature of these databases limits their portability across different computing resources. Moreover, sequencing data submitted by users to these public databases may not be accurate, and annotations provided in the GenBank record, such as the taxonomy assignment, which is crucial for accurate diagnosis, may be inaccurate and/or out of data. Additionally, the descriptors of the sequences in the public databases are not harmonized and lack taxonomic information posing an additional challenge to validate sequence homology-based pathogen detections.