%0 Journal Article
%T PRRDB: A comprehensive database of Pattern-Recognition Receptors and their ligands
%A Sneh Lata
%A Gajendra Raghava
%J BMC Genomics
%D 2008
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2164-9-180
%X The current version of database contains around 500 patterns recognizing receptors from 77 distinct organisms ranging from insects to human. This includes 177 Toll-like receptors, 124 are Scavenger receptors and 67 are Nucleotide Binding Site-Leucine repeats rich receptors. The database also provides information about 266 ligands that includes carbohydrates, proteins, nucleic acids, glycolipids, glycoproteins, lipopeptides. A number of web tools have been integrated in PRRDB in order to provide following services: i) searching on any field; ii) database browsing; and iii) BLAST search against the pattern-recognition receptors. PRRDB also provides external links to standard databases like Swiss-Prot and Pubmed.PRRDB is a unique database of its kind, which provides comprehensive information about innate immunity. This database will be very useful in designing effective adjuvant for subunit vaccine and in understanding role of innate immunity. The database is available from the URL's in the Availabiltiy and requirements section.More than 20 million premature deaths occur every year in the world due to infectious diseases. Every year billions of dollars are spent for the treatment of patients suffering from such diseases, which in turn, poses a great economic burden on the developing nations. Thus, protection of mankind from these dreaded diseases is one of the major challenges in the present era. Fortunately, we have effective vaccines against a number of diseases (e.g. smallpox, polio), which not only save millions of lives but also endows long lasting immunity against these diseases. But these vaccines are available only against a few diseases and the vaccines against the other infectious diseases like malaria, tuberculosis are still wanted. So, developing effective and cheap vaccines against all the infectious diseases is the need of the hour. Strategies to develop vaccines have changed tremendously over the time i.e. from whole pathogen to antigens and from antigen
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/9/180