PharmGED: Pharmacogenetic Effect Database.

Prediction and elucidation of pharmacogenetic effects is important for facilitating the development of personalized medicines. Knowledge of polymorphism-induced and other types of drug-response variations is needed for facilitating such studies. Although databases of pharmacogenetic knowledge, polymorphism and toxicogenomic information have appeared, some of the relevant data are provided in separate web-pages and in terms of relatively long descriptions quoted from literatures. To facilitate easy and quick assessment of the relevant information, it is helpful to develop databases that provide all of the information related to a pharmacogenetic effect in the same web-page and in brief descriptions. We developed a database, Pharmacogenetic Effect Database (PharmGED), for providing sequence, function, polymorphism, affected drugs and pharmacogenetic effects. PharmGED can be accessed at http://bidd.cz3.nus.edu.sg/phg/ free of charge for academic use. It currently contains 1825 entries covering 108 disease conditions, 266 distinct proteins, 693 polymorphisms, 414 drugs/ligands cited from 856 references.

Lignin biodegradation and ligninolytic enzyme studies during biopulping of Acacia mangium wood chips by tropical white rot fungi.

White rot fungi are good lignin degraders and have the potential to be used in industry. In the present work, Phellinus sp., Daedalea sp., Trametes versicolor and Pycnoporus coccineus were selected due to their relatively high ligninolytic enzyme activity, and grown on Acacia mangium wood chips under solid state fermentation. Results obtained showed that manganese peroxidase produced is far more compared to lignin peroxidase, suggesting that MnP might be the predominating enzymes causing lignin degradation in Acacia mangium wood chips. Cellulase enzyme assays showed that no significant cellulase activity was detected in the enzyme preparation of T. versicolor and Phellinus sp. This low cellulolytic activity further suggests that these two white rot strains are of more interest in lignin degradation. The results on lignin losses showed 20-30% of lignin breakdown at 60 days of biodegradation. The highest lignin loss was found in Acacia mangium biotreated with T. versicolor after 60 days and recorded 26.9%, corresponding to the percentage of their wood weight loss recorded followed by P. coccineus. In general, lignin degradation was only significant from 20 days onwards. The overall percentage of lignin weight loss was within the range of 1.02-26.90% over the biodegradation periods. Microscopic observations conducted using scanning electron microscope showed that T. versicolor, P. coccineus, Daedalea sp. and Phellinus sp. had caused lignin degradation in Acacia mangium wood chips.