Hmrbase2: a comprehensive database of hormones and their receptors.

PURPOSE

Hormones play a critical role in regulating various physiological processes and any hormonal imbalances can lead to major endocrine disorders. Thus, studying hormones is essential for both the therapeutics and the diagnostics of hormonal diseases. To facilitate this need, we have developed Hmrbase2, a comprehensive platform that provides extensive information on hormones.

METHODS

Hmrbase2 is a web-based database which is an update of a previously published database, Hmrbase ( http://crdd.osdd.net/raghava/hmrbase/ ). We collected a large amount of information on peptide and non-peptide hormones and hormone receptors, this information being sourced from Hmrbase, HMDB, UniProt, HORDB, ENDONET, PubChem, and the medical literature.

RESULTS

Hmrbase2 contains a total of 12,056 entries, which is more than twice the number of entries contained in the previous version Hmrbase. These include 7406, 753, and 3897 entries for peptide hormones, non-peptide hormones, and hormone receptors, respectively, from 803 organisms compared to the 562 organisms in the previous version. The database also hosts 5662 hormone receptor pairs. The source organism, function, and subcellular location are provided for peptide hormones and receptors and properties such as melting point and water solubility is provided for non-peptide hormones. Besides browsing and keyword search, an advanced search option has also been supplied. Additionally, a similarity search module has been incorporated enabling users to run similarity searches against peptide hormone sequences using BLAST and Smith-Waterman.

CONCLUSIONS

To make the database accessible to various users, we designed a user-friendly, responsive website that can be easily used on smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers. The updated database version, Hmrbase2, offers improved data content compared to the previous version. Hmrbase2 is freely available at https://webs.iiitd.edu.in/raghava/hmrbase2 .