Overview
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About BV-BRC
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Welcome to the Help Documentation site for the Bacterial and Viral Bioinformatics Resource Center (BV-BRC). BV-BRC is a joint effort among the University of Chicago (UChicago), J Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), Fellowship for Interpretation of Genomes (FIG), and University of Virginia (UVA) that provides a web-based information system designed to support the biomedical research community’s work on bacterial and viral infectious diseases via integration of vital pathogen information with rich data and analysis tools. BV-BRC combines the data, technology, and extensive user communities from two long-running centers: PATRIC, the bacterial system , and IRD/ViPR, the viral systems.

BV-BRC is one of two Bionformatics Resource Centers (BRC) currently funded by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).  The other BRC--the Eukaryotic Pathogen, Vector, and Host Informatics Resource (VEuPathDB)--focuses on eukaryotic pathogens and invertebrate vectors of infectious diseases, encompassing data from legacy BRCs devoted to parasitic species (EuPathDB), fungi (FungiDB) and vector species (VectorBase).

Help Documentation Organization
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The BV-BRC Help Documentation is organized into several subsections:

 - `Quick Start <./quick_start/index.html>`_: provides set of introductory videos and documents designed to help users, especially those coming from PATRIC and IRD/ViPR, get started using BV-BRC.

 - `Quick Reference Guides <./quick_references/index.html>`_: provide succinct overviews of specific feature (data, tool, functionality) within the resource with definitions of all of its component parts.

 - `Tutorials <./tutorial/index.html>`_: provide detailed, step-by-step instructions with screen captures to illustrate how to use a particular data type or tool and interpret its results, often with additional information and rationale to enhance its use in the context of a broader biological question. 

 - `FAQs and Common Tasks <./faqs_common_tasks/index.html>`_: provide answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) from our users and instructions for performing common tasks.