Thanks to its outstanding features, human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has been widely exploited in various disciplines, such as population, medical, and forensic genetics. However, the current population, medical and forensic genetic databases still have a large number of flawed sequence data in spite of several suggestions which have been made for avoiding errors in mtDNA sequencing and documentation. The recent interest and availability of applications for detecting errors in mtDNA data has resulted in the mtDNA haplogroup determination based on the well characterized mtDNA phylogeny as a useful a posteriori check on the quality of sequence data (Bandelt HJ et al. Int J Legal Med. 2001;115(2):64-69).

The goal of mtDNAmanager is to provide a web-based forensic mitochondrial bioinformatics resource for management and quality analysis of mtDNA sequence data, using a new approach based on haplogroup estimation and data comparison with the contents of a given database. mtDNAmanager consists of previously reported mtDNA sequences, and a set of bioinformatics tools, able to automatically characterize newly submitted data by estimating its haplogroup according to the haplogroup-specific control region mutation motif.

The mtDNAmanager interface was designed to allow the user to easily manage data and immediately view the results. We also felt important to be able to import the data with batch mode, allowing simultaneous estimation of haplogroups for the data being submitted. mtDNAmanager is made available free of charge, but registration is required to store and manage data with batch mode.

Hwan Young Lee¹, Injee Song², Eunho Ha³, Sung-Bae Cho², Woo Ick Yang¹, and Kyoung-Jin Shin¹

- Search with Google Scholar