Animal Toxins: How is Complexity Represented in Databases?

Toxins (Basel). 2010 Feb;2(2):262-82. doi: 10.3390/toxins2020262. Epub 2010 Feb 21.

Abstract

Peptide toxins synthesized by venomous animals have been extensively studied in the last decades. To be useful to the scientific community, this knowledge has been stored, annotated and made easy to retrieve by several databases. The aim of this article is to present what type of information users can access from each database. ArachnoServer and ConoServer focus on spider toxins and cone snail toxins, respectively. UniProtKB, a generalist protein knowledgebase, has an animal toxin-dedicated annotation program that includes toxins from all venomous animals. Finally, the ATDB metadatabase compiles data and annotations from other databases and provides toxin ontology.

Keywords: ATDB; ArachnoServer; ConoServer; Tox-Prot; UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot; animal toxin; database; venom protein.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Databases, Protein*
  • Peptides
  • Proteins
  • Software*
  • Spider Venoms

Substances

  • Peptides
  • Proteins
  • Spider Venoms