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Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access published online on October 30, 2008
Nucleic Acids Research, doi:10.1093/nar/gkn858
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© 2008 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Database Issue

DEG 5.0, a database of essential genes in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes

Ren Zhang1,* and Yan Lin2

1Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Tianjin Cancer Institute and Hospital, Tianjin 300060 and 2Department of Physics, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +86 22 2740 2987; Fax: +86 22 2335 8329; Email: rzhang.cn{at}gmail.com

Received September 15, 2008. Revised October 14, 2008. Accepted October 16, 2008.

Essential genes are those indispensable for the survival of an organism, and their functions are therefore considered a foundation of life. Determination of a minimal gene set needed to sustain a life form, a fundamental question in biology, plays a key role in the emerging field, synthetic biology. Five years after we constructed DEG, a database of essential genes, DEG 5.0 has significant advances over the 2004 version in both the number of essential genes and the number of organisms in which these genes are determined. The number of prokaryotic essential genes in DEG has increased about 10-fold, mainly owing to genome-wide gene essentiality screens performed in a wide range of bacteria. The number of eukaryotic essential genes has increased more than 5-fold, because DEG 1.0 only had yeast ones, but DEG 5.0 also has those in humans, mice, worms, fruit flies, zebrafish and the plant Arabidopsis thaliana. These updates not only represent significant advances of DEG, but also represent the rapid progress of the essential-gene field. DEG is freely available at the website http://tubic.tju.edu.cn/deg or http://www.essentialgene.org.


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