Data Note

MHCBN 4.0: A database of MHC/TAP binding peptides and T-cell epitopes

Sneh Lata¹ , Manoj Bhasin² and Gajendra PS Raghava¹

¹Bioinformatics Center, Institute of Microbial Technology, Sector 39A, Chandigarh, India

²BIDMC Genomic Center, Harvard Medical School, 238 HIM Building, 77 Avenue Louis Pasteur, Boston, MA 02115, USA

author email corresponding author email

BMC Research Notes 2009, 2:61doi:10.1186/1756-0500-2-61

Published:	20 April 2009

Abstract

Background

Many databases housing the information about MHC binders and non-binders have been developed in the past to help the scientific community working in the field of immunology, immune-informatics or vaccine design. As the information about these MHC binding and non-binding peptides continues to grow with the time and there is a need to keep the databases updated. So, in order to provide the immunological fraternity with the most recent information we need to maintain and update our database regularly. In this paper, we describe the updated version of 4.0 of the database MHCBN.

Findings

MHCBN is a comprehensive database comprising over 25,857 peptide sequences (1053 TAP binding peptides), whose binding affinity with either MHC or TAP molecules has been assayed experimentally. It is a manually curated database where entries are collected & compiled from published literature and existing immunological public databases. MHCBN has a number of web-based tools for the analysis and retrieval of information like mapping of antigenic regions, creation of allele specific dataset, BLAST search, various diseases associated with MHC alleles etc. Further, all entries are hyper linked to major databases like SWISS-PROT, PDB etc. to provide the information beyond the scope of MHCBN. The latest version 4.0 of MHCBN has 6080 more entries than previously published version 1.1.

Conclusion

MHCBN database updating is meant to facilitate immunologist in understanding the immune system and provide them the latest information. We feel that our database will complement the existing databases in serving scientific community.