The Virus Orthologous Groups Database (VOGDB) is a multi-layer database that progressively groups viral genes into groups connected by increasingly remote homology. The first layer is based on pair-wise sequence similarities, the second layer is based on the sequence profile alignments and the third layer uses predicted protein structures to find the most remote homology. VOGDB groups allow for more sensitive homology searches of novel genes and increase the chance of predicting annotations or inferring phylogeny. VOGDB uses all virus genomes from RefSeq and partially re-annotates them. The unique feature of VOGDB is inclusion of both prokaryotic and eukaryotic viruses in the same clustering process which makes it possible to explore old evolutionary relationships of the two groups.
VOGDB has been established in December 2016. VOGDB is updated every 2 months, following the releases of NCBI RefSeq.
This website provides a RSS feed that announces each new release. VOGDB also provides a JSON file for each release. The latest release JSON is always available under: https://fileshare.lisc.univie.ac.at/vog/latest/release.json.
Citation: Trgovec-Greif et al.: VOGDB—Database of Virus Orthologous Groups. Viruses 2024, 16(8), 1191; https://doi.org/10.3390/v16081191