It’s Time to Build the Peptidome!
29th January 2025
Antimicrobial resistance is a growing problem. Peptides, short sequences of amino acids, are nature’s first defense against bacteria. Research on antimicrobial peptides is promising but such research could be much more productive if combined with machine learning on big data. But collecting, collating and organizing big data is a public good and underprovided. Current peptide databases are small, inconsistent, incompatible with one another and they are biased against negative controls. Thus, there is scope for a million-peptide database modelled on something like Human Genome Project or ProteinDB.