The Dfam database is a open collection of Transposable Element DNA sequence alignments, hidden Markov Models (HMMs), consensus sequences, and genome annotations.
Transposable elements (or interspersed repeats) account for a substantial portion of eukaryotic genomes. Accurate annotation of TEs enables research into their biology and can shed light on the evolutionary processes that shape genomes. Dfam represents a collection of multiple sequence alignments, each containing a set of representative members of a specific transposable element family. These alignments (seed alignments) are used to generate HMMs and consensus sequences for each family. The Dfam website gives information about each family, and provides genome annotations for a collection of core genomes. The HMM models, and consensus sequences may also be downloaded from the ftp site, for example to mask repeats in new genomes.