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a catalog of worldwide biological databases

Multitasking, or moonlighting, is the capability of some proteins to execute two or more biological functions. MultitaskProtDB-II is a database of multifunctional proteins that has been updated. In the previous version, the information contained was: NCBI and UniProt accession numbers, canonical and additional biological functions, organism, monomeric/oligomeric states, PDB codes and bibliographic references. In the present update, the number of entries has been increased from 288 to 694 moonlighting proteins. MultitaskProtDB-II is continually being curated and updated. The new database also contains the following information: GO descriptors for the canonical and moonlighting functions, three-dimensional structure (for those proteins lacking PDB structure, a model was made using Itasser and Phyre), the involvement of the proteins in human diseases (78% of human moonlighting proteins) and whether the protein is a target of a current drug (48% of human moonlighting proteins). These numbers highlight the importance of these proteins for the analysis and explanation of human diseases and target-directed drug design. Moreover, 25% of the proteins of the database are involved in virulence of pathogenic microorganisms, largely in the mechanism of adhesion to the host. This highlights their importance for the mechanism of microorganism infection and vaccine design. MultitaskProtDB-II is available at http://wallace.uab.es/multitaskII.