Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

We have developed an updated version of the Animal Toxin Database (ATDB 2.0) that provides a new bioinformatics resource for analyzing toxin-channel (T-C) interactions. Data on more than 54,000 T-C interactions, including 9193 high-confidence interactions, has been extracted, formatted and mapped to toxin and ion channel databases. The interaction data can be accessed easily through a new network browser on the website at http://protchem.hunnu.edu.cn/toxin. This resource may be useful for sequence pattern recognition and prediction of the function of new toxins.

Venomous animals possess an arsenal of toxins for predation and defense. These toxins have great diversity in function and structure as well as evolution and therefore are of value in both basic and applied research. Recently, toxinomics researches using cDNA library sequencing and proteomics profiling have revealed a large number of new toxins. Although several previous groups have attempted to manage these data, most of them are restricted to certain taxonomic groups and/or lack effective systems for data query and access. In addition, the description of the function and the classification of toxins is rather inconsistent resulting in a barrier against exchanging and comparing the data. Here, we report the ATDB database and website which contains more than 3235 animal toxins from UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot and TrEMBL and related toxin databases as well as published literature. A new ontology (Toxin Ontology) was constructed to standardize the toxin annotations, which includes 745 distinct terms within four term spaces. Furthermore, more than 8423 TO terms have been manually assigned to 2132 toxins by trained biologists. Queries to the database can be conducted via a user-friendly web interface at http://protchem.hunnu.edu.cn/toxin.