SVDB: a Comprehensive Domain Specific Database of Snake Venom Toxins Generated Through NCBI

Venoms that drip from the fangs of snakes are incredibly complex chemical cocktails of compounds, with different proteins and enzymes, including a large variety of toxins like myotoxins, cardiotoxins, hemotoxins, and neurotoxins and their countless combinations. In addition to their use in the treatment of snake bites in humans, they have numerous therapeutic and medicinal applications. Potential use of snake venom includes excessive bleeding, stroke, neurological disorders, cancer, diabetes and aging. Therefore, a proper understanding of snake venom toxin and facilitating their use is of utmost importance. In this paper, we describe a novel database, called SVDB, for storage, dissemination and analysis of snake venom and toxins related information. SVDB has autonomous links to NCBI databases to pull relevant information both on-demand and asynchronous ways to facilitate data integration. SVDB includes authentic, non-redundant, up-to-date scientific information on literature, sequences, structures, small molecules, taxonomy and many more. SVDB portal also provides external links to tools like BLAST, CLUSTAL, Swiss-model, phylogeny and other toxin related resources. The architecture of SVDB information fetching, linking and structuring is unique and can be implemented to any domain specific generic data collection pipeline through the NCBI. The database is publicly available at https://www.snakevenomdb.org.