IMGT-ONTOLOGY for Immunogenetics and Immunoinformatics

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Lefranc, Marie-Paule | Giudicelli, Véronique | Ginestoux, Chantal | Bosc, Nathalie | Folch, Géraldine | Guiraudou, Delphine | Jabado-Michaloud, Joumana | Magris, Séverine | Scaviner, Dominique | Thouvenin, Valérie | Combres, Kora | Girod, David | Jeanjean, Stéphanie | Protat, Céline | Monod, Mehdi Yousfi | Duprat, Elodie | Kaas, Quentin | Pommié, Christelle | Chaume, Denys | Lefranc, Gérard

Affiliations: IMGT, the international ImMunoGeneTics information system©, Université Montpellier II, Laboratoire d'ImmunoGénétique Moléculaire LIGM, UPR CNRS 1142, Institut de Génétique Humaine IGH, 141 rue de la Cardonille, 34396 Montpellier Cedex 5, France. Tel.: +33 4 99 61 99 65; Fax: +33 4 99 61 99 01

Note: [] Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]. Institut Universitaire de France

Abstract: IMGT, the international ImMunoGeneTics information system© (http://imgt.cines.fr), is a high quality integrated knowledge resource specialized in immunoglobulins (IG), T cell receptors (TR), major histocompatibility complex (MHC) and related proteins of the immune system (RPI) of human and other vertebrates, created in 1989, by the Laboratoire d'ImmunoGénétique Moléculaire LIGM. IMGT provides a common access to standardized data which include nucleotide and protein sequences, oligonucleotide primers, gene maps, genetic polymorphisms, specificities, 2D and 3D structures. IMGT consists of several sequence databases (IMGT/LIGM-DB, IMGT/MHC-DB, IMGT/PRIMER-DB), one genome database (IMGT/GENE-DB) and one three-dimensional structure database (IMGT/3Dstructure-DB), interactive tools for sequence analysis (IMGT/V-QUEST, IMGT/JunctionAnalysis, IMGT/PhyloGene, IMGT/Allele-Align), for genome analysis (IMGT/GeneSearch, IMGT/GeneView, IMGT/LocusView) and for 3D structure analysis (IMGT/StructuralQuery), and Web resources ("IMGT Marie-Paule page") comprising 8000 HTML pages. IMGT other accesses include SRS, FTP, search by BLAST, etc. By its high quality and its easy data distribution, IMGT has important implications in medical research (repertoire in autoimmune diseases, AIDS, leukemias, lymphomas, myelomas), veterinary research, genome diversity and genome evolution studies of the adaptive immune responses, biotechnology related to antibody engineering (scFv, phage displays, combinatorial libraries) and therapeutical approaches (grafts, immunotherapy). IMGT is freely available at http://imgt.cines.fr.

Keywords: IMGT, ontology, database, information system, knowledge resource, immunoinformatics, immunogenetics, antibody, immunoglobulin, T cell receptor, immunoglobulin superfamily, leukemia, lymphoma, MHC, HLA, Collier de Perles, three-dimensional (3D) structure, primer, polymorphism

Journal: In Silico Biology, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 17-29, 2004