RSwitch: A Novel Bioinformatics Database on Riboswitches as Antibacterial Drug Targets

The RSwitch is a MySQL database implemented on a PHP-based server, which also provides various useful tools for analyses of DNA, RNA, and protein sequences applying a user-friendly interface. The RSwitch database currently contains information and annotations of 215 bacterial riboswitches from 16 different types found in 50 human pathogenic bacteria. The riboswitch classes include those sensing FMN, glmS, Cobalamin, Lysine, SAH, SAM, Purine, TPP, c-di-GMPI, c-di-GMPII, Moco, PreQ1, Fluoride, Glycine, Mg²⁺, and Mn²⁺ type of bacterial riboswitches. The database provides information about the riboswitch aptamer sequences, the thermodynamic ensemble of the RNA structures on partition function and on free minimum energy function. Additionally, the database presents the centroid structure and the positional entropy for each position of the aptamer sequences. The database also provides the biochemical pathways in which the riboswitches are involved in, as well as multiple sequence alignments, multi-drug resistance bacterial strains and consensus motifs for each type of the switches. The RSwitch database is permanently available online without any restrictions. This bioinformatics database provides for the first time all information needed for assessing the suitability of the presented riboswitches as antibacterial drug targets.