StarPepWeb: an integrative, graph-based resource for bioactive peptides
Journal
Bioinformatics Advances
ISSN
2635-0041
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Date Issued
2024
Author(s)
López, Christian
Cárdenas, Roberto
Aguilera-Mendoza, Longendri
Agüero-Chapin, Guillermin
García-Jacas, César R.
Pérez-Pérez, Noel
Type
text::journal::journal article
Abstract
Motivation: The rapid growth of bioactive peptide sequences presents challenges for organization and analysis. Existing repositories often specialize in functions, taxonomic origins, or structural classes, but most remain isolated, use heterogeneous metadata, and lack uniform descriptors or structural models. Few integrative web services exist, offering only partial coverage or depth. As a result, reproducible and comprehensive exploration of the bioactive peptide landscape remains limited, underscoring the need for a unified, source-tracked, extensible platform. Results: We present StarPepWeb, a freely accessible web application that democratizes access to StarPepDB, one of the largest curated repositories of bioactive peptides. The platform integrates 45 120 non-redundant sequences from 40 public databases into a source-tracked graph enriched with metadata, physicochemical features, and predicted 3D structures from ESMFold. Each peptide is represented with ESM-2 embeddings and iFeature descriptors, while the interface supports metadata-aware filtering, alignment-based similarity searches with single and multiple queries, and interactive visualization. A microservice-oriented architecture ensures scalability, maintainability, and reproducible versioned downloads, including Neo4j exports. StarPepWeb thus overcomes deployment and expertise barriers of the standalone database, providing an extensible, cloud-hosted framework for integrative bioactive peptide analysis. ©The authors ©Oxford University Press.
Subjects
License
Acceso Abierto
How to cite
Christian López, Roberto Cárdenas, Longendri Aguilera-Mendoza, Guillermin Agüero-Chapin, Félix Martínez-Rios, César R García-Jacas, Noel Pérez-Pérez, Yovani Marrero-Ponce, StarPepWeb: an integrative, graph-based resource for bioactive peptides, Bioinformatics Advances, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2025, vbaf261, https://doi.org/10.1093/bioadv/vbaf261