Antimicrobial peptide databases: A detailed comparison and complementary features

Abstract

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have garnered considerable attention as promising alternatives to conventional antibiotics, resulting in extensive experimental and computational studies that have generated large volumes of data on peptide sequences, biological activities, structural features, and experimental conditions. To organize and facilitate the use of these data, several AMP databases have been developed; however, they differ markedly in scope, data organization, annotation depth, searchability, data accessibility, usability, and support for computational analysis. In this review, we critically compare five widely used general AMP databases—APD, CAMP, DBAASP, dbAMP, and DRAMP—by analyzing database publications and directly evaluating their current data content, web interfaces, search systems, analytical tools, and suitability for different research workflows. The comparison shows that no single database fully addresses all research needs, as the resources offer complementary strengths in biological annotation, sequence and family analysis, experimental activity data, computational discovery, and therapeutic-development information. These findings highlight the need for more standardized and interoperable database strategies that improve data consistency, annotation quality, searchability, tool reliability, and the comparison, integration, and reuse of AMP data in experimental and computational research.