TUPDB: Target-Unrelated Peptide Data Bank

The isolation of target-unrelated peptides (TUPs) through biopanning remains as a major problem of phage display selection experiments. These TUPs do not have any actual affinity toward targets of interest, which tend to be mistakenly identified as target-binding peptides. Therefore, an information portal for storing TUP data is urgently needed. Here, we present a TUP data bank (TUPDB), which is a comprehensive, manually curated database of approximately 73 experimentally verified TUPs and 1963 potential TUPs collected from TUPScan, the BDB database, and public research articles. The TUPScan tool has been integrated in TUPDB to facilitate TUP analysis. We believe that TUPDB can help identify and remove TUPs in future reports in the biopanning community. The database is of great importance to improving the quality of phage display-based epitope mapping and promoting the development of vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics. The TUPDB database is available at http://i.uestc.edu.cn/tupdb .