RPBS (Ressource Parisienne en Bioinformatique Structurale) is a resource dedicated primarily to structural bioinformatics. It is the result of a joint effort by several teams to set up an interface that offers original and powerful methods in the field. As an illustration, we focus here on three such methods uniquely available at RPBS: AUTOMAT for sequence databank scanning, YAKUSA for structure databank scanning and WLOOP for homology loop modelling. The RPBS server can be accessed at http://bioserv.rpbs.jussieu.fr/ and the specific services at http://bioserv.rpbs.jussieu.fr/SpecificServices.html.

Every year, thousands of tons of antibiotics are used, not only in human and animal health but also as growth promoters in livestock. Consequently, during the last 75 years, antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains have been selected in human and environmental microbial communities. This implies that, even when pathogenic bacteria are the targets of antibiotics, hundreds of nonpathogenic bacterial species are also affected. Here, we performed a comparative study of environmental and human gut microbial communities issuing from different individuals and from distinct human populations across the world. We found that antibiotic resistance and pathogenicity are correlated and speculate that, by selecting for resistant bacteria, we may be selecting for more virulent strains as a side effect of antimicrobial therapy.

Summary: Intragenic duplications of genetic material have important biological roles because of their protein sequence and structural consequences. We developed Swelfe to find internal repeats at three levels. Swelfe quickly identifies statistically significant internal repeats in DNA and amino acid sequences and in 3D structures using dynamic programming. The associated web server also shows the relationships between repeats at each level and facilitates visualization of the results. Availability: http://bioserv.rpbs.jussieu.fr/swelfe Contact: annela@abi.snv.jussieu.fr Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Researchers sorely need markers and approaches for biodiversity exploration (both specimen linked and metagenomics) using the full potential of next generation sequencing technologies (NGST). Currently, most studies rely on expensive multiple tagging, PCR primer universality and/or the use of few markers, sometimes with insufficient variability. We propose a novel approach for the isolation and sequencing of a universal, useful and popular marker across distant, non-model metazoans: the complete mitochondrial genome. It relies on the properties of metazoan mitogenomes for enrichment, on careful choice of the organisms to multiplex, as well as on the wide collection of accumulated mitochondrial reference datasets for post-sequencing sorting and identification instead of individual tagging. Multiple divergent organisms can be sequenced simultaneously, and their complete mitogenome obtained at a very low cost. We provide in silico testing of dataset assembly for a selected set of example datasets. This approach generates large mitogenome datasets. These sequences are useful for phylogenetics, molecular identification and molecular ecology studies, and are compatible with all existing projects or available datasets based on mitochondrial sequences, such as the Barcode of Life project. Our method can yield sequences both from identified samples and metagenomic samples. The use of the same datasets for both kinds of studies makes for a powerful approach, especially since the datasets have a high variability even at species level, and would be a useful complement to the less variable 18S rDNA currently prevailing in metagenomic studies.