CoGenT++:: an extensive and extensible data environment for computational genomics

Motivation: CoGenT++ is a data environment for computational research in comparative and functional genomics, designed to address issues of consistency, reproducibility, scalability and accessibility. Description: CoGenT++ facilitates the re-distribution of all fully sequenced and published genomes, storing information about species, gene names and protein sequences. We describe our scalable implementation of ProXSim, a continually updated all-against-all similarity database, which stores pairwise relationships between all genome sequences. Based on these similarities, derived databases are generated for gene fusions-AllFuse, putative orthologs-OFAM, protein families-TRIBES, phylogenetic profiles-ProfUse and phylogenetic trees. Extensions based on the CoGenT++ environment include disease gene prediction, pattern discovery, automated domain detection, genome annotation and ancestral reconstruction. Conclusion: CoGenT++ provides a comprehensive environment for computational genomics, accessible primarily for large-scale analyses as well as manual browsing.