DRAMP: a comprehensive data repository of antimicrobial peptides

The growing problem of antibiotic-resistant microorganisms results in an urgent need for substitutes to conventional antibiotics with novel modes of action and effective activities. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), produced by a wide variety of living organisms acting as a defense mechanism against invading pathogenic microbes, are considered to be such promising alternatives. AMPs display a broad spectrum of antimicrobial activity and a low propensity for developing resistance. Therefore, a thorough understanding of AMPs is essential to exploit them as antimicrobial drugs. Considering this, we developed a comprehensive user-friendly data repository of antimicrobial peptides (DRAMP), which holds 17349 antimicrobial sequences, including 4571 general AMPs, 12704 patented sequences and 74 peptides in drug development. Entries in the database have detailed annotations, especially detailed antimicrobial activity data (shown as target organism with MIC value) and structure information. Annotations also include accession numbers crosslinking to Pubmed, Swiss-prot and Protein Data Bank (PDB). The website of the database comes with easy-to-operate browsing as well as searching with sorting and filtering functionalities. Several useful sequence analysis tools are provided, including similarity search, sequence alignment and conserved domain search (CD-Search). DRAMP should be a useful resource for the development of novel antimicrobial peptide drugs.