Following up on the prior post about broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) against HIV, there is now a free database available (http://bnaber.org) that offers detailed information on all known bNAbs. The genesis and purpose of the database is described in an open access paper in the journal Nucleic Acids Research. Although not a focus of the paper, it's worth noting that the discovery of growing numbers of bNAbs has been facilitated by major investments in the research, particularly by National Institutes of Health funding for the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology and, more recently, two Centers for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology & Immunogen Discovery (at Duke University and the Scripps Institute) and also by the non-profit International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) though its Neutralizing Antibody Consortium.
Nucleic Acids Res. 2013 Nov 7. [Epub ahead of print]
bNAber: database of broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies. (open access)
Eroshkin AM, Leblanc A, Weekes D, Post K, Li Z, Rajput A, Butera ST, Burton DR, Godzik A.
Abstract
The discovery of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) has provided an enormous impetus to the HIV vaccine research and to entire immunology. The bNAber database at http://bNAber.org provides open, user-friendly access to detailed data on the rapidly growing list of HIV bNAbs, including neutralization profiles, sequences and three-dimensional structures (when available). It also provides an extensive list of visualization and analysis tools, such as heatmaps to analyse neutralization data as well as structure and sequence viewers to correlate bNAbs properties with structural and sequence features of individual antibodies. The goal of the bNAber database is to enable researchers in this field to easily compare and analyse available information on bNAbs thereby supporting efforts to design an effective vaccine for HIV/AIDS. The bNAber database not only provides easy access to data that currently is scattered in the Supplementary Materials sections of individual papers, but also contributes to the development of general standards of data that have to be presented with the discovery of new bNAbs and a universal mechanism of how such data can be shared.
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