Abstract
The growing problem of antibiotic-resistant microorganisms results in an urgent need for substitutes to conventional antibiotics with novel modes of action and effective activities. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), produced by a wide variety of living organisms acting as a defense mechanism against invading pathogenic microbes, are considered to be such promising alternatives. AMPs display a broad spectrum of antimicrobial activity and a low propensity for developing resistance. Therefore, a thorough understanding of AMPs is essential to exploit them as antimicrobial drugs. Considering this, we developed a comprehensive user-friendly data repository of antimicrobial peptides (DRAMP), which holds 17349 antimicrobial sequences, including 4571 general AMPs, 12704 patented sequences and 74 peptides in drug development. Entries in the database have detailed annotations, especially detailed antimicrobial activity data (shown as target organism with MIC value) and structure information. Annotations also include accession numbers crosslinking to Pubmed, Swiss-prot and Protein Data Bank (PDB). The website of the database comes with easy-to-operate browsing as well as searching with sorting and filtering functionalities. Several useful sequence analysis tools are provided, including similarity search, sequence alignment and conserved domain search (CD-Search). DRAMP should be a useful resource for the development of novel antimicrobial peptide drugs.
Highlights
The growing problem of antibiotic-resistant microorganisms results in an urgent need for substitutes to conventional antibiotics with novel modes of action and effective activities
Inappropriate and irrational use of antibiotics has resulted in the emergence of multi-drug resistant microorganisms, spurring an urgent need to develop new generations of antibiotics with novel modes of action and effective activities
Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) may act via a range of mechanisms which include, but are not limited to, bacterial membrane disruption[6], the formation of membrane-spanning pores[7], the inhibition of cell wall biosynthesis[8], and translocation across the cytoplasmic membrane to act on intracellular targets[9]
Summary
Some have focused on AMPs produced by plants (PhytAMP)[22], bacteria (Bactibase)[23], shrimp (Penbase)[24] and milk (MilkAMP)[25], while others have focused on certain properties of AMPs like hemolytic activity (Hemolytik)[26], activity and structure (DBAASP)[27], antibacterial activity (YADAMP)[28], anuran defense peptides (DADP)[29], antiviral activity (AVPdb)[30] and anti-HIV activity (HIPdb)[31] Those databases have played an important role in certain categories of AMPs but have limits on sequences collection. LAMP is a cross-linking database providing hyperlinks to other databases Compared to these databases, DRAMP holds diverse annotations of AMPs including sequence information, structure information, physicochemical information, patent information, clinical information, reference information and especially antimicrobial activity information (shown as target organisms with MIC values). Novel peptides are being developed based on 121 experimentally validated anti-MRSA peptides[38]
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