Infectious diseases are one of the main causes of death around the world each and every year. Microorganisms present in the air, soil and water affect human, plants and animals in Africa and this impedes the development of the whole continent. Several diseases have emerged due to the cohabitation of animals and human beings. Sometimes, the pathogen evolve, evade the host defenses by varying their antigenic molecules and this renders the host vulnerable. The aim of this project was to develop an Infectious Disease Evolutionary Analysis System (IDEAS), which provides appropriate tools for the researchers in the area of microbial genomics, to perform an intensive computational and evolutionary analysis of existing and newly-sequenced infectious-causing pathogens. A web-based front-end application was developed for interacting with the data warehouse. Several facilities have been provided for interfacing with the sequences. Some of them include: similarity searches using BLAST, calculate the evolutionary rate of genes, text-mining component to search for specific genes, identification of polymorphic genes and highly-conserved genes, geographical visualization of the evolution of infectious diseases on the African continent. This project is a comprehensive and in-depth study in the area of infectious diseases that will have a positive impact on all the researchers in the African continent that are actively involved in bioinformatics.
