IMGT-ONTOLOGY, IMGT Databases, Tools, and Web Resources for Immunoinformatics - Immunoinformatics - page 14

mented for the IG, TR, and MHC of human and other vertebrates, data and knowl-
edge management standardization has now been extended to the IgSF proteins other
than IG or TR (Williams and Barclay 1988) and to the MhcSF proteins other than
MHC (Maenaka and Jones 1999), of any species (IMGT Repertoire (RPI)). Thus,
standardization in IMGT ® contributed to data enhancement of the system and new
expertised data concepts were readily incorporated.
The IMGT ® information is of much value to clinicians and biological scientists in
general. IMGT ® databases and tools are extensively queried and used by scientists,
from both academic and industrial laboratories, who are equally distributed between
the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world. IMGT ® is used in very diverse
domains: (i) fundamental research and medical research (repertoire analysis of the IG
antibody sites and of the TR recognition sites in normal and pathological situations
such as autoimmune diseases, infectious diseases, AIDS, leukemias, lymphomas, mye-
lomas), (ii) veterinary research (IG and TR repertoires in farm and wildlife species),
(iii) genome diversity and genome evolution studies of the adaptive immune responses,
(iv) structural evolution of the IgSF and MhcSF proteins, (v) biotechnology related to
antibody engineering (single chain Fragment variable (scFv), phage displays, combina-
torial libraries, chimeric, humanized, and human antibodies), (vi) diagnostics (clonali-
ties, detection and follow-up of residual diseases), and (vii) therapeutical approaches
(grafts, immunotherapy, vaccinology). By its high quality and its data distribution
based on IMGT-ONTOLOGY, IMGT ® has an important role to play in the develop-
ment of immunogenetics Web services. The design of IMGT-Choreography and the
creation of dynamic interactions between the IMGT ® databases and tools, using Web
services and IMGT-ML, represent novel and major developments of IMGT ® , the inter-
national reference in immunogenetics and immunoinformatics.
1.8 Citing IMGT ®
Users are requested to cite this article, and to quote the IMGT ® home page URL,
http://imgt.cines.fr. Individual IMGT ® databases, tools, and Web resources should
also be quoted where relevant: IMGT/GENE-DB (Giudicelli et al. 2005),
IMGT/GeneInfo (Baum et al. 2006), IMGT/LIGM-DB (Giudicelli et al. 2006),
IMGT/MHC-DB (Robinson et al. 2003), IMGT/PRIMER-DB (Folch et al. 2004),
IMGT/V-QUEST (Giudicelli et al. 2004), IMGT/JunctionAnalysis (Yousfi Monod et
al. 2004), IMGT/PhyloGene (Elemento and Lefranc 2003), IMGT/3Dstructure-DB
(Kaas et al. 2004), IMGT/StructuralQuery (Kaas et al. 2004), and IMGT/Collier-de-
Perles (Kaas and Lefranc 2005; Kaas and Lefranc 2007).
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the IMGT ® team for its expertise and its constant motivation.
I thank Véronique Giudicelli, Joumana Jabado-Michaloud, Chantal Ginestoux,
Géraldine Folch, Patrice Duroux, François Ehrenmann, Xavier Brochet, and Gérard
Lefranc for helpful discussion. IMGT ® is a registered Centre National de la Recher-