BioTD: An Online Database of Biotoxins
Biotoxins, mainly produced by venomous animals, plants, and microorganisms, exhibit high physiological activity and unique effects such as lowering blood pressure and analgesia. A number of venom-derived drugs are already available on the market, with many more candidates currently undergoing clinical and laboratory studies. However, drug design resources related to biotoxins are insufficient, particularly because of a lack of accurate and extensive activity data. To fulfill this demand, we developed the Biotoxins Database (BioTD). BioTD is the largest open-source database for toxins, offering open access to 14,607 data records (8,185 activity records), covering 8,975 toxins sourced from 5,220 references and patents across over 900 species. The activity data in BioTD are categorized into five groups: Activity, Safety, Kinetics, Hemolysis, and other physiological indicators. Moreover, BioTD provides data on 1,532 mutants, refines the whole sequence and signal peptide sequences of toxins, and annotates disulfide-bond information. All of the data in the database can be downloaded for free. Given the importance of biotoxins and their associated data, this new database is expected to attract broad interest from diverse research fields in drug discovery. BioTD is freely accessible at http://biotoxin.net/.