Disease associated cytokine SNPs database: an annotation and dissemination model.

Cytokines mediate crucial functions in innate and adaptive immunity. They play valuable roles in immune cell growth and lineage specification, and are associated with various disease pathologies. A large number of low, medium and high throughput studies have implicated association of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in cytokine genes with diseases. A preponderance of such experiments has not shown any causality of an identified SNP to the associated disease. Instead, they have identified statistically significant SNP-disease associations; it is likely that some of these cytokine gene variants may directly or indirectly cause the disease phenotype(s). To fill this knowledge gap and derive study parameters for cytokine SNP-disease causality relationships, we have designed and developed the disease associated cytokine SNP database (DACS-DB). DACS-DB has data on 456 cytokine genes, approximately 63,000 SNPs, and 853 SNP-associated diseases. In DACS-DB, among other attributes, we present functional annotation, and heterozygosity allele frequency for the SNPs, and literature-validated SNP association for diseases. Users of the DB can run queries such as the ones to find disease-associated SNPs in a cytokine gene, and all the SNPs involved in a disease. We have developed a web front end (available at http://www.iupui.edu/~cytosnp) to disseminate this information for immunologists, biomedical researchers, and other interested biological researchers. Since there is no such comprehensive collection of disease associated cytokine SNPs, this DB will be vital to understand the role of cytokine SNPs as markers in disease, and more importantly, in causality to disease thus helping to identify drug targets for common inflammatory diseases.