VKCDB: voltage-gated K+ channel database updated and upgraded

The Voltage-gated K+ Channel DataBase (VKCDB) (http://vkcdb.biology.ualberta.ca) makes a comprehensive set of sequence data readily available for phylogenetic and comparative analysis. The current update contains 2063 entries for full-length or nearly full-length unique channel sequences from Bacteria (477), Archaea (18) and Eukaryotes (1568), an increase from 346 solely eukaryotic entries in the original release. In addition to protein sequences for channels, corresponding nucleotide sequences of the open reading frames corresponding to the amino acid sequences are now available and can be extracted in parallel with sets of protein sequences. Channels are categorized into subfamilies by phylogenetic analysis and by using hidden Markov model analyses. Although the raw database contains a number of fragmentary, duplicated, obsolete and non-channel sequences that were collected in early steps of data collection, the web interface will only return entries that have been validated as likely K+ channels. The retrieval function of the web interface allows retrieval of entries that contain a substantial fraction of the core structural elements of VKCs, fragmentary entries, or both. The full database can be downloaded as either a MySQL dump or as an XML dump from the web site. We have now implemented automated updates at quarterly intervals.