Nucleic acids are the biopolymers, or small biomolecules, essential to all known forms of life. The term nucleic acid is the overall name for DNA and RNA. They are composed of nucleotides, which are the monomers made of three components: a 5-carbon sugar, a phosphate group and a nitrogenous base. If the sugar is a compound ribose, the polymer is RNA ; if the sugar is derived from ribose as deoxyribose, the polymer is DNA.
An epitope, also known as antigenic determinant, is the part of an antigen that is recognized by the immune system, specifically by antibodies, B cells, or T cells. For example, the epitope is the specific piece of the antigen to which an antibody binds. The part of an antibody that binds to the epitope is called a paratope. Although epitopes are usually non-self proteins, sequences derived from the host that can be recognized are also epitopes.
BioPerl is a collection of Perl modules that facilitate the development of Perl scripts for bioinformatics applications. It has played an integral role in the Human Genome Project.
A peptidomimetic is a small protein-like chain designed to mimic a peptide. They typically arise either from modification of an existing peptide, or by designing similar systems that mimic peptides, such as peptoids and β-peptides. Irrespective of the approach, the altered chemical structure is designed to advantageously adjust the molecular properties such as, stability or biological activity. This can have a role in the development of drug-like compounds from existing peptides. These modifications involve changes to the peptide that will not occur naturally. Based on their similarity with the precursor peptide, peptidomimetics can be grouped into four classes where A features the most and D the least similarities. Classes A and B involve peptide-like scaffolds, while classes C and D include small molecules.
Phage display is a laboratory technique for the study of protein–protein, protein–peptide, and protein–DNA interactions that uses bacteriophages to connect proteins with the genetic information that encodes them. In this technique, a gene encoding a protein of interest is inserted into a phage coat protein gene, causing the phage to "display" the protein on its outside while containing the gene for the protein on its inside, resulting in a connection between genotype and phenotype. These displaying phages can then be screened against other proteins, peptides or DNA sequences, in order to detect interaction between the displayed protein and those other molecules. In this way, large libraries of proteins can be screened and amplified in a process called in vitro selection, which is analogous to natural selection.
Sir Gregory Paul Winter is a Nobel Prize-winning British biochemist best known for his work on the therapeutic use of monoclonal antibodies. His research career has been based almost entirely at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering, in Cambridge, England.
Aptamers are oligonucleotide or peptide molecules that bind to a specific target molecule. Aptamers are usually created by selecting them from a large random sequence pool, but natural aptamers also exist in riboswitches. Aptamers can be used for both basic research and clinical purposes as macromolecular drugs. Aptamers can be combined with ribozymes to self-cleave in the presence of their target molecule. These compound molecules have additional research, industrial and clinical applications.
In academia, computational immunology is a field of science that encompasses high-throughput genomic and bioinformatics approaches to immunology. The field's main aim is to convert immunological data into computational problems, solve these problems using mathematical and computational approaches and then convert these results into immunologically meaningful interpretations.
The DrugBank database is a comprehensive, freely accessible, online database containing information on drugs and drug targets. As both a bioinformatics and a cheminformatics resource, DrugBank combines detailed drug data with comprehensive drug target information. DrugBank has used content from Wikipedia. Wikipedia also often links to Drugbank.
Chemical Entities of Biological Interest, also known as ChEBI, is a database and ontology of molecular entities focused on 'small' chemical compounds, that is part of the Open Biomedical Ontologies effort. The term "molecular entity" refers to any "constitutionally or isotopically distinct atom, molecule, ion, ion pair, radical, radical ion, complex, conformer, etc., identifiable as a separately distinguishable entity". The molecular entities in question are either products of nature or synthetic products which have potential bioactivity. Molecules directly encoded by the genome, such as nucleic acids, proteins and peptides derived from proteins by proteolytic cleavage, are not as a rule included in ChEBI.
A mimotope is a macromolecule, often a peptide, which mimics the structure of an epitope. Because of this property it causes an antibody response similar to the one elicited by the epitope. An antibody for a given epitope antigen will recognize a mimotope which mimics that epitope. Mimotopes are commonly obtained from phage display libraries through biopanning. Vaccines utilizing mimotopes are being developed. Mimotopes are a kind of peptide Aptamers.
mRNA display is a display technique used for in vitro protein, and/or peptide evolution to create molecules that can bind to a desired target. The process results in translated peptides or proteins that are associated with their mRNA progenitor via a puromycin linkage. The complex then binds to an immobilized target in a selection step. The mRNA-protein fusions that bind well are then reverse transcribed to cDNA and their sequence amplified via a polymerase chain reaction. The result is a nucleotide sequence that encodes a peptide with high affinity for the molecule of interest.
Biopanning is an affinity selection technique which selects for peptides that bind to a given target. All peptide sequences obtained from biopanning using combinatorial peptide libraries have been stored in a special freely available database named BDB. This technique is often used for the selection of antibodies too.
The Proteolysis MAP (PMAP) is an integrated web resource focused on proteases.
In molecular biology Short Linear Motifs are short stretches of protein sequence that mediate protein–protein interaction.
Minimotif Miner is a program and database designed to identify minimotifs in any protein. Minimotifs are short contiguous peptide sequences that are known to have a function in at least one protein. Minimotifs are also called sequence motifs or short linear motifs or SLiMs. These are generally restricted to one secondary structure element and are less than 15 amino acids in length.
AceDB is a biological database for handling genomic data. It was developed by Richard M. Durbin and Jean Thierry-Mieg in 1989. AceDB stands for a C. elegans database. Although AceDB was initially created as a database specifically for the nematode worm it has also come to mean the database software itself, which has been used to store information for other species. According to its website, AceDB provides a custom database kernel with a non-standard data model designed with flexibility in mind. For example, there is an AceDB instance for the organism Pristionchus pacificus called AppaDB. Much of the functionality of AceDB for C. elegans has been made available through the WormBase database.
Creative Biolabs, Inc. is a life-science company which produces and supplies biotech products and services for early drug discovery and development, including various phage display libraries such as pre-made libraries, phage display services, antibody sequencing, and antibody humanization. Customers include pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, government agencies, clinical research organizations and biotechnology companies.
The Actinobacteriophage database, more commonly known as PhagesDB, is a database-backed website that gathers and shares information related to the discovery, characterization and genomics of viruses that prefer to infect Actinobacterial hosts. It is a bioinformatics tool that is used worldwide to compare multiple phages and their genomic annotations. Up to recent dates, there have been more than 8,000 bacteriophages, including over 1,600 with already sequenced genomes, have been entered into the database. It is an addition to the wide range of priorly existing bioinformatic tools, like NCBI. It provides results of already sequenced phage genomes and aims to allow access to drafted phage genomes to provide a larger spectrum of information.
SEA-PHAGES stands for Science Education Alliance-Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science; it was formerly called the National Genomics Research Initiative. This was the first initiative launched by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Science Education Alliance (SEA) by their director Tuajuanda C. Jordan in 2008 to improve the retention of Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students. SEA-PHAGES is a two-semester undergraduate research program administered by the University of Pittsburgh's Graham Hatfull's group and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Science Education Division. Students from over 100 universities nationwide engage in authentic individual research that includes a wet-bench laboratory and a bioinformatics component.
