Toxins 2010, 2, 262-282; doi:10.3390/toxins2020261 OPEN ACCESS toxins ISSN 2072-6651 www.mdpi.com/journal/toxins Review Animal Toxins: How is Complexity Represented in Databases? Florence Jungo 1,*, Anne Estreicher 1, Amos Bairoch 2, Lydie Bougueleret 1 and Ioannis Xenarios 1,3 1 Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Centre Medical Universitaire, 1 rue Michel-Servet, 1211 Genève 4, Switzerland; E-Mails:
[email protected] (A.E.);
[email protected] (L.B.);
[email protected] (I.X.) 2 Department of Structural Biology and Bioinformatics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva, Switzerland; E-Mail:
[email protected] (A.B.) 3 Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Vital-IT Group, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail:
[email protected]; Tel.: +41-22-379-5050; Fax: +41-22-379-5858. Received: 22 January 2010; in revised form: 10 February 2010 / Accepted: 11 February 2010 / Published: 21 February 2010 Abstract: Peptide toxins synthesized by venomous animals have been extensively studied in the last decades. To be useful to the scientific community, this knowledge has been stored, annotated and made easy to retrieve by several databases. The aim of this article is to present what type of information users can access from each database. ArachnoServer and ConoServer focus on spider toxins and cone snail toxins, respectively. UniProtKB, a generalist protein knowledgebase, has an animal toxin-dedicated annotation program that includes toxins from all venomous animals. Finally, the ATDB metadatabase compiles data and annotations from other databases and provides toxin ontology.