A comprehensive resource for integrating and displaying protein post-translational modifications

BACKGROUND: Protein Post-Translational Modification (PTM) plays an essential role in cellular control mechanisms that adjust protein physical and chemical properties, folding, conformation, stability and activity, thus also altering protein function. FINDINGS: dbPTM (version 1.0), which was developed previously, aimed on a comprehensive collection of protein post-translational modifications. In this update version (dbPTM2.0), we developed a PTM database towards an expert system of protein post-translational modifications. The database comprehensively collects experimental and predictive protein PTM sites. In addition, dbPTM2.0 was extended to a knowledge base comprising the modified sites, solvent accessibility of substrate, protein secondary and tertiary structures, protein domains, protein intrinsic disorder region, and protein variations. Moreover, this work compiles a benchmark to construct evaluation datasets for computational study to identifying PTM sites, such as phosphorylated sites, glycosylated sites, acetylated sites and methylated sites. CONCLUSION: The current release not only provides the sequence-based information, but also annotates the structure-based information for protein post-translational modification. The interface is also designed to facilitate the access to the resource. This effective database is now freely accessible at .