About DADP
DADP: Database of Anuran Defense Peptides. It currently contains 2571 entries with a total of 1923 different bioactive sequences, of which 921 peptides have the minimum inhibiting concentration (MIC) against at least one microorganism.
ORIGIN: It has been collected from published papers and UniProt entries. The database is manually curated.
SEQUENCES: Special attention has been devoted to precursors and in particular to conserved signal peptides common to antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and related bioactive peptides with host defense functions, including defense from predators.
TOOL: DADP can be used as a tool to assist studies in the evolutionary origin of the rich endowment of bioactive peptides found in the skin of most frogs and toads. It can be also used to help find novel potential AMPs in genomic or EST databases of amphibians by indirect search for the conserved signal peptides, and the presence of the characteristic tripartite sequence arrangement – signal peptide followed by acidic propeptide and mature AMP/bioactive peptide. The quantitative activity data (MIC and HC50) can be used for QSAR studies.
SIGNAL SEQUENCES: The database currently contains 1766 signal peptides, many of which are identical in different precursor sequences. An example is the signal peptide MFTLKKSLLLLFFLGTINLSLC which is found in 164 precursor entries from several different frog species and is associated with more than a hundred mature bioactive peptides, such as brevinins, nigrosins, temporins and many other AMP classes.
CLASSES: Phylogenetic analyses suggest that signal sequences can be subdivided into six different classes. To see it please use the CLASSES link.
ANNOTATION: For each peptide or precursor the database stores various additional annotations, such as the primary structure, antimicrobial or other activity, host taxonomy, biogeography information, and (when known) MIC with respect to E. coli and S. aureus, extracted only from those published papers that use the microdilution assay. Less frequent data are from haemolysis assays with human or mammalian erythorcytes (HC50). The database illustrates that a large number of potential antibiotics, anticancer peptides and other peptides with possible therapeutic applications have been found during the past twenty five years by studying almost 200 anuran species, only a few of which are amongst the 2200 endangered anuran species in the IUCN Red List.
The annotation 'Peptide names' should be useful to connect different peptides from the same precursors or identical peptides that have been given different names.
SEARCH: 'Search' and 'Advanced Search' functions enable efficient searching for peptides, their host defense activities and corresponding references, through the annotations present in each DADP entry.
VERSION: 1.6 01/03/2012
People and institutions involved:
Prof. Dr. Davor Juretić, Faculty of Science, University of Split, Split, Croatia
Dr. Juraj Simunić, Faculty of Science, University of Split, Split, Croatia
PhD student Mario Novković, Faculty of Science, University of Split, Split, Croatia
PhD student Viktor Bojović, Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Prof. Dr. Alessandro Tossi, Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy
Citation:
M. Novković, J. Simunić, V. Bojović, A. Tossi, D. Juretić: DADP: the database of anuran defense peptides, Bioinformatics 28 (2012) 1406-1407. Abstract
Contact Information: juretic@pmfst.hr