The Construction Of Antifreeze Related Proteins Database

Antifreeze related proteins play pivotal role in protect organisms against freeze injury and havinggreat application value, so it has been a focus for many years. Researches have shown that antifreezerelated proteins mainly contains two classes: antifreeze proteins and ice nucleation proteins. Antifreezeproteins restrain the growth of ice crystal and ice nucleation proteins are able to regulate the distributingby inducing ice nucleation at higher low temperature. In spite of the progress, these proteins, especiallyantifreeze proteins, differ from both sequences and structures between different species. Researches ontheir prediction and mechanism are still under way. However, most of the research data spread arounddifferent public databases and literatures, with different quality level and lack of some importantannotations, as lead to uneasy search or system analysis on these data and are not good for antifreezerelated researches. So it is very necessary to collect and mine these data and construct an expertantifreeze related proteins database and build corresponding web platform in order to promoteantifreeze related research better.We constructed the first antifreeze related proteins database AFRProt. Data were derived fromUniProt and literatures and filtered by scientific examination. Now678data were included in ourdatabase with630antifreeze proteins and48ice nucleation proteins. Annotations focused on proteins,integrating the primary information from UniProt and gaining corresponding nucleic acid and structureinformation from GenBank and PDB database separately. Besides, more work was done throughbioinformatics tools, such as signal peptide prediction and physicochemical property calculation. Inview of the specificity of these proteins, we mined more important antifreeze related features from lotsof literatures in order to complement the annotations. Finally, preliminary classification was madeaccording to multiple sequence alignment and features, and we complement some of the annotationsbased on the classification.We designed friendly and succinct web server based on popular J2EE-SSH(Struts+Spring+Hibernate). Both data browse and advanced search can be make. All these work would provide an usefuldata platform for antifreeze related research and support its development. The address of AFRProt is:http://www.afrprot.org.