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

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

In the present study we have reported a freely accessible database, which can serve as a comprehensive and high quality resource of peptides involved in molecular mimicry. We have also incorporated the information related to autoimmune diseases as well as in-depth information about mimicry peptide and proteins. The database is named, miPepBase (Mimicry Peptide Database), which is available at http:// proteininformatics.org/mkumar/mipepbase. All molecular mimicry based autoimmunity events compiled in miPepBase were experimentally verified by the respective researchers and are supported by peer-reviewed publications. MiPepBase is an open access database that provides comprehensive information about the mimicry proteins and peptides of both host (and model) and pathogen. The information includes the names of host and pathogen proteins, sequences of mimicry peptide, autoimmune disease caused due to mimicry peptide, gene ontology information of the protein, PDB ID of the structure of protein (if present), type of immunological response generated by mimicry peptide and much more. We anticipate that miPepBase will help researchers to generate new hypothesis about different aspects of molecular mimicry and also act as a unified resource of information about molecular mimicry. The miPepBase can be searched using keyword(s) or by autoimmune disease(s) or by a combination of host and pathogen taxonomic groups or their names. The database also includes BLAST search tool to facilitate sequence similarity search against the mimicry proteins and/or peptide contained in it. Each miPepBase entry is also linked to many popular global repositories such as UniProt (Apweiler et al., 2004) , PDB (Berman et al., 2000) , EMBL-EBI QuickGO (Binns et al., 2009) , and PubMed. MiPepBase also provides information about physicochemical properties of proteins containing mimicry peptides, which might be helpful in predicting the nature of protein and optimization of its expression. The basic architecture of miPepBase is shown in Figure 1 . The data of miPepBase can also be downloaded in text file. Overall, mimicry peptides which are compiled in miPepBase might help in opening new gateways to explore the role of molecular mimicry in autoimmune diseases that are yet unaddressed. It is anticipated that miPepBase would be helpful in understanding the details of molecular mimicry and expedite the process of disease detection, diagnosis, prognosis, and even deciding the therapeutic regimen of autoimmune diseases.