Parasitic pathogens continue to unleash massive havoc by causing debilitating ailments in mankind and species of economic and veterinary importance. Intensified studies on protozoan pathogenesis have widened our viewing aperture for virulence and immune evasion factors which is important to search relevant targets for chemotherapeutic intervention and prevention of the disease. To facilitate further research and to provide an integrated platform for comparative genomics of different parasitic protozoans we have constructed a comprehensive and user-friendly knowledgebase of virulent proteins from ten protozoan genera and organized them under a unifying classification scheme with categories such as adhesion, invasion, cysteine proteases, etc. A number of powerful bioinformatics tools for blast and phylogenetic analysis are provided. With the rapidly burgeoning interest in the pathogenesis mechanisms of protozoans we anticipate that the database will be useful to the research community. |