title: TollML: a database of toll-like receptor structural motifs.
abstract: Toll-like receptors (TLRs) play a key role in the innate immune system. TLRs recognize pathogen-associated molecular patterns and initiate an intracellular kinase cascade to induce an immediate defensive response. During recent years TLRs have become the focus of tremendous research interest. A central repository for the growing amount of relevant TLR sequence information has been created. Nevertheless, structural motifs of most sequenced TLR proteins, such as leucine-rich repeats (LRRs), are poorly annotated in the established databases. A database that organizes the structural motifs of TLRs could be useful for developing pattern recognition programs, structural modeling and understanding functional mechanisms of TLRs. We describe TollML, a database that integrates all of the TLR sequencing data from the NCBI protein database. Entries were first divided into TLR families (TLR1-23) and then semi-automatically subdivided into three levels of structural motif categories: (1) signal peptide (SP), ectodomain (ECD), transmembrane domain (TD) and Toll/IL-1 receptor (TIR) domain of each TLR; (2) LRRs of each ECD; (3) highly conserved segment (HCS), variable segment (VS) and insertions of each LRR. These categories can be searched quickly using an easy-to-use web interface and dynamically displayed by graphics. Additionally, all entries have hyperlinks to various sources including NCBI, Swiss-Prot, PDB, LRRML and PubMed in order to provide broad external information for users. The TollML database is available at http://tollml.lrz.de.
authors.affiliation: Center for Nanoscience, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, 80799, Munich, Germany.
authors.forename: Jing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gong
authors.forename: Tiandi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.forename: Ning
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Ferdinand
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Jamitzky
authors.forename: Wolfgang M
authors.initials: WM
authors.lastname: Heckl
authors.forename: Shaila C
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Rössle
authors.forename: Robert W
authors.initials: RW
authors.lastname: Stark
mesh_terms: D020816:Amino Acid Motifs; D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D001665:Binding Sites; D030562:Databases, Protein; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D005810:Multigene Family; D020033:Protein Isoforms / Q000737:chemistry / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism; D017434:Protein Structure, Tertiary; D020449:Repetitive Sequences, Amino Acid; D017386:Sequence Homology, Amino Acid; D051193:Toll-Like Receptors / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism
chemical_list: D020033:Protein Isoforms; D051193:Toll-Like Receptors