Following the rapid development of sequencing technology and the requirements of several related disciplines, mtDNA data has increased drastically over the past years. Therefore, the quality control and efficient analysis of those data are becoming increasingly important.

Long Fan and his supervisor Yong-Gang Yao present a multifunctional platform called MitoTool to improve the current situation. It has advantages in (i) parsing diverse types of mtDNA data, (ii) automatically classifying the haplogroups of the samples, (iii) appraising the accuracy of the haplogroups classified by users, (iv) analyzing each variation in detail, (v) identifying the potential pathogenic mutation based on the reported data, and (vi) performing statistical analysis for haplogroup distribution frequency between case and control groups. In addition, it offers an integrated database for retrieving several kinds of mitochondrion-related information. The overall process is in batch mode without login requirement, and the analytical results can be conveniently saved to office software. It is reasonable to expect that MitoTool will become a versatile tool for mtDNA studies. The MitoTool is freely accessed at http:// www.mitotool.org.

This work has been reported in the international academic journal Mitochondrion (MitoTool: A web server for the analysis and retrieval of human mitochondrial DNA sequence variations.
). It was supported by the National Science Foundation of China, Yunnan Province and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.