Amyloid : the international journal of experimental and clinical investigation : the official journal of the International Society of Amyloidosis
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AL-Base, a curated database of human immunoglobulin (Ig) light chain (LC) sequences derived from patients with AL amyloidosis and controls, is described, along with a collection of analytical and graphic tools designed to facilitate their analysis. AL-Base is designed to compile and analyse amyloidogenic Ig LC sequences and to compare their predicted protein sequence and structure to non-amyloidogenic LC sequences. Currently, the database contains over 3000 de-identified LC nucleotide and amino acid sequences, of which 433 encode monoclonal proteins that were reported to form fibrillar deposits in AL patients. ⋯ Currently, tools are available to search for sequences by various criteria, to analyse the biochemical properties of the predicted amino acids at each position and to display the results in a graphical fashion. The likelihood that each sequence has evolved through somatic hypermutation can be predicted using an automated binomial or multinomial distribution model. AL-Base is available to the scientific community for research purposes.