miPepBase: A Database of Experimentally Verified Peptides Involved in Molecular Mimicry

Garg, Anjali; Kumari, Bandana; Kumar, Ravindra; Kumar, Manish

There are number of well documented molecular mimicry events, using which bacteria, viruses, or parasites evade the host's immune response (Oldstone, 2005) . The pathogen's protein having similar epitope to that of the host results in cross-reactivity that generates immunological response against self (i.e., host), which ultimately leads to autoimmune diseases (Oldstone, 1998; Cusick et al., 2012) . The peptides, which display this property, are called mimicry peptides and the phenomenon is called molecular mimicry (Davies, 1997) . The role of molecular mimicry in autoimmune disease was getting strengthen when it was observed that the antibody against the phosphoprotein of measles virus and Herpes simplex type I can cross-react with human intermediate filament protein vimentin (Fujinami et al., 1983) . Molecular mimicry can cause several immune-mediated disease such as Grave's disease (Kohn et al., 2000; Chen et al., 2001) , Insulin-dependent diabetes (Rose and Mackay, 2000; Hiemstra et al., 2001) , Multiple sclerosis (Banki et al., 1994; Wucherpfennig and Strominger, 1995; Appelmelk et al., 1996; Talbot et al., 1996; Rose and Mackay, 2000) , Peptic ulcer (Appelmelk et al., 1996) , Rheumatoid arthritis (Tiwana et al., 1999; Balandraud et al., 2004; Bridges, 2004) , Systemic lupus erythematosus (Rönnblom and Alm, 2001; Kaufman et al., 2003; McClain et al., 2005) , Myocarditis (Neu et al., 1987; Huber et al., 1994; Gauntt et al., 1995; Schulze and Schultheiss, 1995; Ang et al., 2004) , and cancer as well, by modulating key signaling pathways, such as those involving Ras (Guven-Maiorov et al., 2016) . A number of studies have deciphered various prospects and aspects of molecular mimicry, but these are scattered in numerous research papers. Compilation of the available information from literature can greatly facilitate the researchers who work in this domain. At present there is no data repository, which contains all the information related to autoimmune diseases caused due to molecular mimicry because piecing, together of this scattered data and discerning the accompanying details is complicated and tedious. To the best of our knowledge, only one database namely mimicDB (Ludin et al., 2011) is available which provides information about proteins or epitopes involved in host-pathogen interactions. But mimicDB is restricted to information pertaining to only a few human parasites. Also, the mimicry candidates of mimicDB were predicted through a computational pipeline.