Prometheus, an omics portal for interkingdom comparative genomic analyses.

Abstract

Functional analyses of genes are crucial for unveiling biological responses, genetic engineering, and developing new medicines. However, functional analyses have largely been restricted to model organisms, representing a major hurdle for functional studies and industrial applications. To resolve this, comparative genome analyses can be used to provide clues to gene functions as well as their evolutionary history. To this end, we present Prometheus, a web-based omics portal that contains more than 17,215 sequences from prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes. This portal supports interkingdom comparative analyses via a domain architecture-based gene identification system and Gene Search, and users can easily and rapidly identify single or entire gene sets in specific pathways. Bioinformatics tools for further analyses are provided in Prometheus or through Bio-Express, a cloud-based bioinformatics analysis platform. Prometheus is a new paradigm for comparative analyses of large amounts of genomic information.