Allergen Atlas: a comprehensive knowledge center and analysis resource for allergen information

A variety of specialist databases have been developed to facilitate the study of allergens. However, these databases either contain different subsets of allergen data or are deficient in tools for assessing potential allergenicity of proteins. Here, we describe Allergen Atlas, a comprehensive repository of experimentally validated allergen sequences collected from in-house laboratory, online data submission, literature reports and all existing general-purpose and specialist databases. Each entry was manually verified, classified and hyperlinked to major databases including Swiss-Prot, Protein Data Bank (PDB), Gene Ontology (GO), Pfam and PubMed. The database is integrated with analysis tools that include: (i) keyword search, (ii) BLAST, (iii) position-specific iterative BLAST (PSI-BLAST), (iv) FAO/WHO criteria search, (v) graphical representation of allergen information network and (vi) online data submission. The latest version contains information of 1593 allergen sequences (496 IUIS allergens, 978 experimentally verified allergens and 119 new sequences), 56 IgE epitope sequences, 679 links to PDB structures and 155 links to Pfam domains. Availability: Allergen Atlas is freely available at http://tiger.dbs.nus.edu.sg/ATLAS/. Contact: martti@nus.edu.sg.