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Although research on influenza lasted for more than 100 years, it is still one of the most prominent diseases causing half a million human deaths every year. With the recent observation of new highly pathogenic H5N1 and H7N7 strains, and the appearance of the influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 swine-like lineage, a collaborative effort to share observations on the evolution of this virus in both animals and humans has been established. The OpenFlu database (OpenFluDB) is a part of this collaborative effort. It contains genomic and protein sequences, as well as epidemiological data from more than 27,000 isolates. The isolate annotations include virus type, host, geographical location and experimentally tested antiviral resistance. Putative enhanced pathogenicity as well as human adaptation propensity are computed from protein sequences. Each virus isolate can be associated with the laboratories that collected, sequenced and submitted it. Several analysis tools including multiple sequence alignment, phylogenetic analysis and sequence similarity maps enable rapid and efficient mining. The contents of OpenFluDB are supplied by direct user submission, as well as by a daily automatic procedure importing data from public repositories. Additionally, a simple mechanism facilitates the export of OpenFluDB records to GenBank. This resource has been successfully used to rapidly and widely distribute the sequences collected during the recent human swine flu outbreak and also as an exchange platform during the vaccine selection procedure. Database URL: http://openflu.vital-it.ch.

UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, a curated protein database, and dictyBase, the Model Organism Database for Dictyostelium discoideum, have established a collaboration to improve data sharing. One of the major steps in this effort was the 'Dicty annotation marathon', a week-long exercise with 30 annotators aimed at achieving a major increase in the number of D. discoideum proteins represented in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot. The marathon led to the annotation of over 1000 D. discoideum proteins in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot. Concomitantly, there were a large number of updates in dictyBase concerning gene symbols, protein names and gene models. This exercise demonstrates how UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot can work in very close cooperation with model organism databases and how the annotation of proteins can be accelerated through those collaborations.