Construction of PANM Database (Protostome DB) for rapid annotation of NGS data in Mollusks

A stand-alone BLAST server is available that provides a convenient and amenable platform for the analysis of molluscan sequence information especially the EST sequences generated by traditional sequencing methods. However, it is found that the server has limitations in the annotation of molluscan sequences generated using next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms due to inconsistencies in molluscan sequence available at NCBI. We constructed a web-based interface for a new stand-alone BLAST, called PANM-DB (Protostome DB) for the analysis of molluscan NGS data. The PANM-DB includes the amino acid sequences from the protostome groups-Arthropoda, Nematoda, and Mollusca downloaded from GenBank with the NCBI taxonomy Browser. The sequences were translated into multi-FASTA format and stored in the database by using the formatdb program at NCBI. PANM-DB contains 6% of NCBInr database sequences (as of 24-06-2015), and for an input of 10,000 RNA-seq sequences the processing speed was 15 times faster by using PANM-DB when compared with NCBInr DB. It was also noted that PANM-DB show two times more significant hits with diverse annotation profiles as compared with Mollusks DB. Hence, the construction of PANM-DB is a significant step in the annotation of molluscan sequence information obtained from NGS platforms. The PANM-DB is freely downloadable from the web-based interface (Malacological Society of Korea, http://malacol.or/kr/blast) as compressed file system and can run on any compatible operating system.