NAR Molecular Biology Database Collection entry number 0760

Database Description

VFDB (http://www.mgc.ac.cn/VFs/) is aimed to provide an in-depth coverage of the major virulence factors (VFs) from various best-characterized bacterial pathogens, with emphasis on functional and structural biology, and essential immunology. This thorough and comprehensive VFDB will be maintained up to date, which would be helpful for researchers to elucidate pathogenic mechanisms in infectious diseases that require further immediate investigations for the development of novel approaches of the disease treatment and prevention. The first release of VFDB contains cumulative information of VFs for 16 important bacteria pathogens, virulence-associated genes, protein structural features, functions, mechanisms and important literatures. Pathogenicity islands, which are clusters of genes encoding virulence traits, are also included. Many graphic illustrations are made according to the original research papers or reviews for an easy grasp of the functions and structures of some VFs. The database is user-friendly; fully searchable by query text or by function categories of VFs, as well as by BLAST comparison against all the VF-related genes.

Acknowledgements

VFDB is funded by the National Basic Research Priorities Program (grant no. 2005CB522904) and the High Technology Research and Development Program (grant no. 2001AA223011) from the Ministry of Science and Technology of China.

References

1. Chen L, Yang J, Yu J, Yao Z, Sun L, Shen Y, Jin Q. (2005) VFDB: a reference database for bacterial virulence factors. Nucleic Acids Res. 33:D325-D328.

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