MitoTool: A web server for the analysis and retrieval of human mitochondrial DNA sequence variations

MitoTool, a web-based bioinformatics platform, is designed for deciphering human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data in batch mode. The platform has advantages in (i) parsing diverse types of mtDNA data; (ii) automatically classifying haplogroup according to mtDNA sequences or variants; (iii) discovering possibly missing variants of the samples with claimed haplogroups status; (iv) estimating the evolutionary conservation index, protein coding effect and potential pathogenicity of certain substitutions; (v) performing statistical analysis for haplogroup distribution frequency between case and control groups. Furthermore, it offers an integrated database for retrieving five types of mitochondrion-related information. The MitoTool is freely accessed at http://www.mitotool.org. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. and Mitochondria Research Society. All rights reserved.