Maintaining up-to-date, widely accepted annotation standards requires continuous collaboration with the greater scientific community. The NCBI Viral Genome Annotation Working Group was established to leverage consortia of public databases, sequencing centers, and research groups to develop standardized sequence annotation as well as isolate naming schemes for different groups of viruses (59–63). This approach not only establishes standards for viral annotation but also represents these standards within the current RefSeq record, ensuring accessibility for all database users and submitters. Similar collaborations are also necessary to support value added, interpretive resources such as the HIV-1, human interaction database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/viruses/retroviruses/hiv-1/interactions/) (64). Collaborators from the Southern Research Institute provide documented HIV-1, human molecular interactions curated from the literature and NCBI maintains a user friendly resource where users can query for specific types of interactions and find more information about the genes involved.
