Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

LymPHOS is a web-oriented database containing peptide and protein sequences and spectrometric information on the phosphoproteome of primary human T-Lymphocytes. Current release 2.0 contains 15 566 phosphorylation sites from 8273 unique phosphopeptides and 4937 proteins, which correspond to a 45-fold increase over the original database description. It now includes quantitative data on phosphorylation changes after time-dependent treatment with activators of the TCR-mediated signal transduction pathway. Sequence data quality has also been improved with the use of multiple search engines for database searching. LymPHOS can be publicly accessed at http://www.lymphos.org. Database URL: http://www.lymphos.org.

T lymphocytes mediate cellular and humoral defense against foreign bodies or autoantigens. An understanding of T-cell information processing furthers studies of the immunological response. We describe a large-scale phosphorylation analysis of primary T cells using a multidimensional separation strategy, involving preparative SDS-PAGE for prefractionation, in-gel digestion and sequential phosphopeptide enrichment using IMAC and TiO2. A total of 281 phosphorylation sites (197 of high confidence, Ascore > 15), mapping to 204 human gene sequences, were identified by LC-MS(n) analysis in an LTQ linear ion trap. Subsequently, we created the LymPHOS database (http://lymphos.org), which links mass spectrometric peptide information to phosphorylation sites and phosphoprotein sequences.