Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Biochemistry, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
  • 2 Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America; Perdana University Graduate School of Medicine, Serdang, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia
  • 3 Department of Biochemistry, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore; Cancer Science Institute of Singapore (CSI), National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore; Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, Indiana, United States of America
PLoS One, 2014;9(8):e104597.
PMID: 25157689 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0104597

Abstract

Signal transducers and activators of transcription (STAT) proteins are key signalling molecules in metazoans, implicated in various cellular processes. Increased research in the field has resulted in the accumulation of STAT sequence and structure data, which are scattered across various public databases, missing extensive functional annotations, and prone to effort redundancy because of the dearth of community sharing. Therefore, there is a need to integrate the existing sequence, structure and functional data into a central repository, one that is enriched with annotations and provides a platform for community contributions. Herein, we present STATdb (publicly available at http://statdb.bic.nus.edu.sg/), the first integrated resource for STAT sequences comprising 1540 records representing the known STATome, enriched with existing structural and functional information from various databases and literature and including manual annotations. STATdb provides advanced features for data visualization, analysis and prediction, and community contributions. A key feature is a meta-predictor to characterise STAT sequences based on a novel classification that integrates STAT domain architecture, lineage and function. A curation policy workflow has been devised for regulated and structured community contributions, with an update policy for the seamless integration of new data and annotations.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.