Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

Given the increasing number of proteins reported to be regulated by S-nitrosylation (SNO), it is considered to act, in a manner analogous to phosphorylation, as a pleiotropic regulator that elicits dual effects to regulate diverse pathophysiological processes by altering protein function, stability, and conformation change in various cancers and human disorders. Due to its importance in regulating protein functions and cell signaling, dbSNO (http://dbSNO.mbc.nctu.edu.tw) is extended as a resource for exploring structural environment of SNO substrate sites and regulatory networks of S-nitrosylated proteins. An increasing interest in the structural environment of PTM substrate sites motivated us to map all manually curated SNO peptides (4165 SNO sites within 2277 proteins) to PDB protein entries by sequence identity, which provides the information of spatial amino acid composition, solvent-accessible surface area, spatially neighboring amino acids, and side chain orientation for 298 substrate cysteine residues. Additionally, the annotations of protein molecular functions, biological processes, functional domains and human diseases are integrated to explore the functional and disease associations for S-nitrosoproteome. In this update, users are allowed to search a group of interested proteins/genes and the system reconstructs the SNO regulatory network based on the information of metabolic pathways and protein-protein interactions. Most importantly, an endogenous yet pathophysiological S-nitrosoproteomic dataset from colorectal cancer patients was adopted to demonstrate that dbSNO could discover potential SNO proteins involving in the regulation of NO signaling for cancer pathways. © The Author(s) 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research.

S-nitrosylation (SNO), a selective and reversible protein post-translational modification that involves the covalent attachment of nitric oxide (NO) to the sulfur atom of cysteine, critically regulates protein activity, localization and stability. Due to its importance in regulating protein functions and cell signaling, a mass spectrometry-based proteomics method rapidly evolved to increase the dataset of experimentally determined SNO sites. However, there is currently no database dedicated to the integration of all experimentally verified S-nitrosylation sites with their structural or functional information. Thus, the dbSNO database is created to integrate all available datasets and to provide their structural analysis. Up to April 15, 2012, the dbSNO has manually accumulated >3000 experimentally verified S-nitrosylated peptides from 219 research articles using a text mining approach. To solve the heterogeneity among the data collected from different sources, the sequence identity of these reported S-nitrosylated peptides are mapped to the UniProtKB protein entries. To delineate the structural correlation and consensus motif of these SNO sites, the dbSNO database also provides structural and functional analyses, including the motifs of substrate sites, solvent accessibility, protein secondary and tertiary structures, protein domains and gene ontology. The dbSNO is now freely accessible via http://dbSNO.mbc.nctu.edu.tw. The database content is regularly updated upon collecting new data obtained from continuously surveying research articles.