An Introduction to Mitochondrial Informatics

In this chapter, we review the public resources available for human mitochondrial DNA and protein related bioinformatics, with a special focus on mitochondrial single nucleotide polymorphisms (mtSNPs). We also review our own freeware tool V-MitoSNP, giving an overview of its implementation and program workflow. Apart from these, we review several protocols for the graphic input of genes, keywords, gene searching by sequence, mtSNP searching by sequence, restriction enzyme mining, primer design, and virtual electrophoresis for PCR-RFLP genotyping. Some databases with similar function are integrated and compared.