Introduction to ICTVdB

The Universal Virus Database, ICTVdB, is authorized by ICTV (International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses) and has been constructed by Cornelia Büchen-Osmond, from 1991-2000 in the Bioinformatics Group, Australian National University, in consultation with ATCC and supported by NSF. In 2001 ICTVdB moved to the Biosphere 2 Center, the Western Campus of the Earth Institute, Columbia University of New York USA. Version 4 is an update of Version 3, copyrighted by ICTV in 2002. Recently, the ICTVdB server was physically relocated to the C2B2 at Columbia University. In 2006, Sean Conlan in the Jerome L. and Dawn Greene Infectious Disease Laboratory at Columbia University became project manager in charge of organizing the migration of the database and design of the user interface.


The directory of ICTVdB is an index of viruses, a list of approved virus names linked to virus descriptions coded from information in Virus Taxonomy: The Eighth Report of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, Fauquet et al. (eds) Academic Press (2005), and includes updates subsequently approved by ICTV. It also incorporates the plant virus database VIDEdB and is illustrated with EM pictures, diagrams and images of symptoms contributed by virologists around the world.


The goals of ICTVdB are as follows:

• Provide the online ICTV resource for virus nomenclature and taxonomy
• Provide a controlled descriptive grammar for viruses
• Facilitate virus identification
• Facilitate the tracking of virus isolate data from around the world
• Provide a centralized system for storing and tracking published viral isolates