PHOSIDA 2011: the posttranslational modification database

The primary purpose of PHOSIDA (http://www.phosida.com) is to manage posttranslational modification sites of various species ranging from bacteria to human. Since its last report, PHOSIDA has grown significantly in size and evolved in scope. It comprises more than 80 000 phosphorylated, N-glycosylated or acetylated sites from nine different species. All sites are obtained from high-resolution mass spectrometric data using the same stringent quality criteria. One of the main distinguishing features of PHOSIDA is the provision of a wide range of analysis tools. PHOSIDA is comprised of three main components: the database environment, the prediction platform and the toolkit section. The database environment integrates and combines high-resolution proteomic data with multiple annotations. High-accuracy species-specific phosphorylation and acetylation site predictors, trained on the modification sites contained in PHOSIDA, allow the in silico determination of modified sites on any protein on the basis of the primary sequence. The toolkit section contains methods that search for sequence motif matches or identify de novo consensus, sequences from large scale data sets.