A Comprehensive Resource Of Neuropeptides

Neuropeptides are a group of biologically active peptides which are produced and released by neurons. Neuropeptides represent a class of cell-cell signaling molecules and play important roles in many physiological processes and therapy of nervous system diseases. In general, neuropeptides act via activation receptors. Most recpetors are G protein-coupled receptors except atrial natriuretic peptide. Neuropeptide signaling systems are complex because of lots of neuropeptides bind to multiple receptors and many recpetors also bind to diverse neuropeptides.In recent years, the number of neuropeptides and their receptors has increased steadily. Thus, it is important to develop a comprehensive resource of neuropeptides. This paper describes a database called NeuroPep which is a highly curated database.The neuropeptide information has been collected from the literature and the public databases UniProt, www.neuropeptides.nl and NeuroPedia. We also collected their receptos from UniProt and verified by HMM. The current version of NeuroPep contains 6888 neuropeptide entries originating from 632 organisms belonging to 65 neuropeptide families. The database also contains information about 2146 neuropeptide receptor and 2112 neuropeptide-receptor pairs. Moreover, NeuroPep contains annotations for each entry, including name, source organism, family, tissue specificity, Uniprot ID, sequence length, posttranslational modifications, literature references and so on.It also provides hyperlink to Uniprot and Taxonomy. The databsase not only provides browse and search of neuropeptide, their receptor and neuropeptide-receptor pairs, but also provides sequence aligment and mapping.It is currently the most complete neuropeptide database.A major features of NeuroPep is that it provides neuropeptide-receptor pairs, it is convenient to view the information of receptor or ligand.