The 2024 IPD-MHC database update: a comprehensive resource for major histocompatibility complex studies

The IPD-MHC Database project (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ipd/mhc/) serves as a comprehensive and expertly curated repository for major histocompatibility complex (MHC) sequences from non-human species, providing the necessary infrastructure and tools to study the function and evolution of this highly polymorphic genomic region. In its latest version, the IPD-MHC database has expanded both in content and in the tools for data visualization and comparison. The database now hosts over 18 000 MHC alleles from 125 species, organized into eleven taxonomic groups, all manually curated and named by the Comparative MHC Nomenclature Committee. A cetacean section has recently been included, offering researchers valuable data to study the immune system of whales, dolphins, and porpoises, as well establishing the official nomenclature platform for the Cetacea Leukocyte Antigens (CeLA). In response to user demand and reflecting broader trends in bioinformatics and immunogenetics, IPD-MHC now includes the predicted tertiary structure of over 8000 alleles and allows comparison and visualisation of allele variation within and between species at single residue resolution. These latest developments maintain the critically important link between official nomenclature of curated alleles and the ability to analyse this complex polymorphism using the most up to date methods within a single repository.