D1028 Nucleic Acids Research, 2012, Vol. 40, Database issue Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) (8) and PubMed resources of NCBI, are provided. Brief descriptions of diseases associated with a gene’s variations, if any, and a summary of the nature of the variations are also provided. Content for such pages for the various blood group systems has been contributed by various experts and is continually updated. The BGMUT website also has a few introductory tutorials on blood group systems and provides links to online resources on blood groups as well as on human gene mutations and polymorphisms in general. Information on the nature of the genes of the H, MNS, Rh and RhAG systems in non-humans, primarily primates and their allelic variations is also provided. BGMUT also makes available brief descriptions of other carbohydrate antigens such as the Tk and Sid (Sda) antigens on erythrocytes. ADDITIONAL TOOLS OF INTEREST AT THE PARENT dbRBC RESOURCE Besides BGMUT, the dbRBC resource contains tools and other resources developed at the NCBI to provide access to publicly available information on human blood group systems. Two of the tools are brieﬂy described here. The alignment viewer tool (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pro- jects/gv/rbc/align.fcgi?cmd=aligndisplay) provides an interface to choose alleles of genes of many of the blood group systems for sequence alignment, though allelic entries in BGMUT cannot be directly chosen in the current interface. Chosen sequences can be displayed as genomic DNA, cDNA or amino acid sequences. Positions known to bear gene polymorphisms can be highlighted, and so can be speciﬁc differences within a set of allelic sequences. The reference sequence itself can be chosen. Besides the alignment, a user can switch to a display of selected sequences in FASTA format. Nucleotide or protein sequences for individual exons and/or introns can be displayed for each allele in alignment to the refer- ence sequence. When the three dimensional structure of a gene’s protein product is known, amino acid differences of various alleles can be projected onto the protein model for viewing with the CN3D model viewer (9). dbRBC’s sequencing-based typing tool (http://www .ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gv/rbc/sbt.cgi?cmd=main) is of use to evaluate the allelic composition of sequencing- based typing results of cDNA or genomic sequences (10). It allows for the comparison of result sequences with se- quences of known alleles of genes of various human blood group systems. The results of the comparison are returned as a table of potential allele hits, along with the respective nucleotide changes, and links for closer examination of the alignments within the dbRBC alignment viewer tool. With a continuous increase in the number of available alleles, dbRBC is testing the implementation of an allelic nomenclature system based on one in use for the HLA system (11). Thus, for example, the reference ABO gene allele sequence is named ABO*A1.01.01.01. The name consists of the gene name, followed by an asterisk, and for blocks separated by periods. The leading block is to group sequences ﬁrst by their main serological phenotypes (e.g. A1, A2 or Ax phenotypes of the ABO system). Sequences that share the same serological phenotype, but differ in their amino acid sequences, are differentiated by the second block. The third block lists alleles that have an identical amino acid sequence, but show synonymous mutations in their exonic DNA sequence. The last block differentiates sequences that share an identical DNA sequence in the coding region, but differ in non-coding regions. Alleles of the ABO, FUT1, FUT2 and FUT3 genes have been given additional names as per this system as of July 2011. FUTURE PLANS Currently, allelic information compiled in BGMUT is not integrated with that outside the BGMUT but within the dbRBC resource. The latter set of alleles of genes for human blood group systems have been programmatically collected from various NCBI resources. Plans for an inte- gration so that BGMUT allelic entries are available for use within the alignment viewer and the sequencing-based typing tools of dbRBC are under consideration. As a part of this integration, BGMUT alleles will be assigned add- itional names as per the nomenclature system outlined in the above section if a decision is made to implement it after consultation with various experts. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We thank Raymond Dunivin and Douglas Hoffman at NCBI for help with the implementation and maintenance of the BGMUT database. FUNDING Funding for developing and maintaining the Database, was provided by the Department of Biochemistry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, N.Y., 10461, USA, and from the David Opochinsky/Blumenfeld Family Fund (to O.O.B.). Intramural funding of the US National Institutes of Health (to NCBI and W.H.) Conﬂict of interest statement. None declared. REFERENCES 1. Sayers,E.W., Barrett,T., Benson,D.A., Bolton,E., Bryant,S.H., Canese,K., Chetvernin,V., Church,D.M., DiCuccio,M., Federhen,S. et al. (2011) Database resources of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Nucleic Acids Res., 39, D38–D51. 2. Broadberry,R.E. and Lin,M. (1996) The distribution of the MiIII (Gp.Mur) phenotype among the population of Taiwan. Transfus. Med., 6, 145–148. 3. Claustres,M., Horaitis,O., Vanevski,M. and Cotton,R.G. (2002) Time for a uniﬁed system of mutation description and reporting: a review of locus-speciﬁc mutation databases. Genome Res., 12, 680–688. 4. 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