About the Database

The Guide to PHARMACOLOGY (GtoPdb) is a searchable database with quantitative information on drug targets and the prescription medicines and experimental drugs that act on them. It was originally created in a collaboration between The British Pharmacological Society (BPS) and the International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (IUPHAR) and is now developed jointly with funding from the Wellcome Trust. It is intended to become a 'one-stop shop' portal to pharmacological information.

This database is an annexe to the Guide to PHARMACOLOGY. All ligands contained here have a corresponding entry in GtoPdb, and all sequences are ultimately derived from an interaction between a GtoPdb ligand and a GtoPdb target.

SynPharm is a database of ligand-responsive protein sequences, derived from interactions from the Guide to PHARMACOLOGY and using data from the Protein Data Bank.

The sequences here are obtained by identifying the protein chain that interacts with a ligand for a given Guide to PHARMACOLOGY interaction, determining the binding residues, and producing a continuous 'bind sequence' that can be used to confer drugability to another protein.

Each bind sequence also contains metrics such as atomic contact ratio and proportional length, and visualisations such as the residue distance matrix, to allow you to better judge whether a sequence is likely to be able to fold independently.

The rationale for such a project was to enable the development of orthogonal molecular switches - switches which only respond to an exogenous molecular trigger, which itself will not interfere with endogenous receptors.