phiBIOTICS is a free database service provided by the Institute of Molecular Biology, Slovak Academy of Sciences. phiBIOTICS is a pilot project dedicated to bacteriophage and bacterial enzybiotics. Database maintains information about biological and biochemical properties of therapeutic enzybiotics and about relevant research studies and practical applications. There are two basic requirements for including a new enzybiotics entry: (i) it has to be currently present in the UniProt database and (ii) there is publically available information about relevant research studies and/or practical application. To date the database contains completely processed data for 21 enzybiotics and 69 corresponding research studies (Release 2012.1, June 2012).
Enzybiotics (also referred as protein antibiotics) represent the new type of antimicrobial agents to be used together with - or instead of - antibiotics. The term enzybiotic is a hybrid word from enzyme and antibiotic and it was first used in 2001 (Nelson at al., 2001). It refers mainly to the antibacterial potential of bacteriophage lytic enzymes endowed with the capacity to degrade bacterial cell wall. Recently, it was suggested that concept of enzybiotics should be extended and refer to all the enzymes, regardless of their origin, exhibiting antibacterial and/or antifungal activity (Veiga-Crespo et al., 2007). Further information related to enzybiotics can be found in Veiga-Crespo et al. (2010), Fischetti (2010), Hermoso et al. (2007) or Borysowksi et al. (2006).
You can explore the data by browsing and filtering the entries in our Browse section. Tools section provides phiBiScan search tool, used for prediction of potential enzybiotics based on their similarities with selected Pfam families. For more instructions see our Help page.
This project was supported by the Scientific Grant Agency of the Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic and of Slovak Academy of Sciences (VEGA) [grant number VEGA 2/0100/09] and by the Slovak Research and Development Agency (APVV) [grant number APVV-0098-10].
If you find phiBIOTICS useful, please consider citing the reference that describes this work:
Hojckova, K., Stano, M., Klucar,L. (2013): phiBIOTICS: catalogue of therapeutic enzybiotics, relevant research studies and practical applications.
BMC Microbiology. 13:53.
doi:10.1186/1471-2180-13-53