AMPs were a recent curation focus (http://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2015/05/21/) (26). AMPs are naturally occurring peptides that are found in a diverse array of species and have been implicated in many immune roles including bactericidal, antiviral, antifungal and even antitumor activities. A list of over 130 human genes encoding one or more experimentally proven AMPs was gathered from several publicly available AMP datasets and also mined from publications. Most of these AMPs had not been previously identified in the RefSeq database, and none of the AMP databases connected the peptides to their encoding gene. RefSeq curators manually annotated the RefSeq records for each AMP-encoding human gene to ensure that the functional peptide was annotated, to include a publication describing the antimicrobial activity of the peptide, to add a brief summary describing the antimicrobial activity of the encoded AMP, and to store a new RefSeq attribute ‘Protein has antimicrobial activity’ which is included in the RefSeq attribute structured comment (e.g. NM_001124.2 for ADM; GeneID: 133). To access all of the curated human transcript or protein AMP records, search the nucleotide or protein database using ‘Protein has antimicrobial activity[properties]’. Currently, this search will find 191 RefSeq records, including splice variants and protein isoforms.
