Welcome to miPepBase
Autoimmune diseases become operative due to several reasons, out of which cross-reactivity between epitopes shared by host and pathogen is an important reason. At times, to subvert the host defense, the pathogen encodes proteins, which might hijack host pathways by mimicking the binding surfaces of host-encoded proteins. This process is called as "Molecular Mimicry". If there is a cross reactivity between the pathogen and host “disease-related” epitopes, this might trigger autoimmunity, resulting in an autoimmune disease.
miPepBase (Mimicry Peptide Database) is a database of only experimentally verified peptide sequences, which exhibit molecular mimicry. miPepBase provides comprehensive information about proteins and peptides of both host (and model) and pathogen, which are involved in the process of molecular mimicry.
The miPepBase can be searched using a keyword or, by autoimmune disease(s) or by a combination of host and pathogen taxonomic group or their name. Information related to sequence, structure, gene ontology and source of article are also hyperlinked with appropriate sources like UniProt, PDB, EMBL-EBI, Quick GO and PubMed. It also provides information about physicochemical properties of protein and mimicry peptides, which might be helpful in predicting the nature of protein and optimization of protein expression. To facilitate searching of proteins and/or epitope that is similar to the user’s interest, BLAST search tool is also present in the miPepBase.
