Compilation and comparison of Virological and biochemical resources

To counter the data growth, scientists have created curated databases in specific areas. While this is supposed to help scientists to cope with the data explosion, the flood of such bioinformatics resources has created a huge problem. To help scientists in making scientific-database-selection there is an urgent need to compile all resources in one place and provide additional guidance. Such a need is particularly high in the areas of microbiology and some aspects of biochemistry such as carbohydrates and lipids. The current work involved, a) listing the bioinformatics resources relevant to microbiology, carbohydrates and lipids; b) cataloging them systematically and then c) comparing the databases from selected categories. A first time compilation of maximum number of databases has been achieved. A total of 173 microbiology databases have been listed and categorized into viral (28), fungal (23), bacterial (71), antimicrobial peptide databases (4), plant pathogen databases (3) and others (42).