Genome analysis PLATCOM: a Platform for Computational Comparative

Motivation: As more whole genome sequences become available, comparing multiple genomes at the sequence level can provide insight into new biological discovery. However, there are significant chal-lenges for genome comparison. The challenge includes requirement for computational resources owing to the large volume of genome data. More importantly, since the choice of genomes to be compared is entirely subjective, there are too many choices for genome com-parison. For these reasons, there is pressing need for bioinformatics systems for comparing multiple genomes where users can choose genomes to be compared freely. Results: PLATCOM (Platform for Computational Comparative Genomics) is an integrated system for the comparative analysis of multiple genomes. The system is built on several public data-bases and a suite of genome analysis applications are provided as exemplary genome data mining tools over these internal databases. Researchers are able to visually investigate genomic sequence sim-ilarities, conserved gene neighborhoods, conserved metabolic path-ways and putative gene fusion events among a set of selected multiple genomes