ESTviewer: a web interface for visualizing mouse, rat, cattle, pig and chicken conserved ESTs in human genes and human alternatively spliced variants.

Abstract

ESTviewer is a web application for interactively visualizing human gene structures, with emphasis on mammalian and avian expressed sequence tags (ESTs) that are conserved in the human genome and alternatively spliced (AS) variants. AS variants from the UCSC, Vega and PSEP annotations are presented in this application for comparison. EST data from six species, human, mouse, rat, cattle, pig and chicken, are mapped to the human genome to show cross-species EST conservation in annotated exonic and intronic regions. Cross-species EST conservation is evolutionarily and functionally important because it represents the effects of selection pressure on genic regions and transcriptome over evolutionary time. Emphatically, ESTviewer provides a convenient tool to compare highly conserved non-human ESTs and human AS variants. The application takes human gene accession Ids or coordinates of genomic sequences as inputs and presents annotated gene structures and their AS variants. In addition, the lengths and percentages of human genic regions covered by ESTs are displayed to show the level of EST coverage of different species. The percentages of the UCSC, Vega and PSEP annotated exons covered by ESTs of the six studied species are also displayed in the interface.