Immunome Knowledge Base (IKB): An integrated service for immunome research

BACKGROUND: Functioning of the immune system requires the coordinated expression and action of many genes and proteins. With the emergence of high-throughput technologies, a great amount of molecular data is available for the genes and proteins of the immune system. However, these data are scattered into several databases and literature and therefore integration is needed. DESCRIPTION: The Immunome Knowledge Base (IKB) is a dedicated resource for immunological information. We identified and collected genes that are essential for the immunome. Nucleotide and protein sequences, as well as information about the related pseudogenes are available for 893 human essential immunome genes. To allow the study of the evolution of the immune system, data for the orthologs of human genes was collected. In addition to the human immunome, ortholog groups of 1811 metazoan immunity genes are available with information about the evidence of their immunity function. IKB combines three previous databases and several additional data items in an integrated system. CONCLUSION: IKB provides in one single service access to several databases and resources and contains plenty of new data about immune system. The most recent addition is variation data on genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic levels for all the immunome genes and proteins. In the future, more data will be added on the function of these genes. The service has a free and public web interface.