The Immune Epitope Database (IEDB): 2018 update

The Immune Epitope Database (IEDB, iedb.org) captures experimental data confined in figures, text and tables of the scientific literature, making it freely available and easily searchable to the public. The scope of the IEDB extends across immune epitope data related to all species studied and includes antibody, T cell, and MHC binding contexts associated with infectious, allergic, autoimmune, and transplant related diseases. Having been publicly accessible for >10 years, the recent focus of the IEDB has been improved query and reporting functionality to meet the needs of our users to access and summarize data that continues to grow in quantity and complexity. Here we present an update on our current efforts and future goals.

The Immune Epitope Database enables and accelerates research

The Immune Epitope Database and Analysis Project (IEDB) is a freely available resource funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to advance immunology research. The database allows easy searching of all published experimental data characterizing antibody and T cell epitopes studied in humans, non-human primates, and other animal species. Epitopes involved in infectious disease, allergy, autoimmunity, and transplant are included. The data were derived from more than 19,000 publications. The IEDB also hosts tools that assist in the prediction and analysis of B cell and T cell epitopes. In recent years, the IEDB has updated its search interface and added highly sought after data, such and antibody and TCR sequence information. We will detail how the IEDB can be used to facilitate immunological research.

The immune epitope database (IEDB) 3.0

The IEDB, www.iedb.org, contains information on immune epitopes—the molecular targets of adaptive immune responses—curated from the published literature and submitted by National Institutes of Health funded epitope discovery efforts. From 2004 to 2012 the IEDB curation of journal articles published since 1960 has caught up to the present day, with >95% of relevant published literature manually curated amounting to more than 15 000 journal articles and more than 704 000 experiments to date. The revised curation target since 2012 has been to make recent research findings quickly available in the IEDB and thereby ensure that it continues to be an up-to-date resource. Having gathered a comprehensive dataset in the IEDB, a complete redesign of the query and reporting interface has been performed in the IEDB 3.0 release to improve how end users can access this information in an intuitive and biologically accurate manner. We here present this most recent release of the IEDB and describe the user testing procedures as well as the use of external ontologies that have enabled it.