dbDiarrhea: the database of pathogen proteins and vaccine antigens from diarrheal pathogens.

Diarrhea occurs world-wide and is most commonly caused by gastrointestinal infections which kill around 2.2 million people globally each year, mostly children in developing countries. We describe here dbDiarrhea, which is currently the most comprehensive catalog of proteins implicated in the pathogenesis of diarrhea caused by major bacterial, viral and parasitic species. The current release of the database houses 820 proteins gleaned through an extensive and critical survey of research articles from PubMed. The major contributors to this compendium of proteins are Escherichia coli and Salmonella enterica. These proteins are classified into different categories such as Type III secretion system effectors, Type III secretion system components, and Pathogen proteins. There is another complementary module called 'Host proteins'. dbDiarrhea also serves as a repository of the research articles describing (1) trials of subunit and whole organism vaccines (2) high-throughput screening of Type III secretion system inhibitors and (3) diagnostic assays, for various diarrheal pathogens. The database is web accessible through an intuitive user interface that allows querying proteins and research articles for different organism, keywords and accession number. Besides providing the search facility through browsing, the database supports sequence similarity search with the BLAST tool. With the rapidly burgeoning global burden of the diarrhea, we anticipate that this database would serve as a source of useful information for furthering research on diarrhea. The database can be freely accessed at http://www.juit.ac.in/attachments/dbdiarrhea/diarrhea_home.html.