RADB: a database of rheumatoid arthritis-related polymorphisms

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disease that has a complex genetic basis. Therefore, it is important to explore the genetic background of RA. The extensive recent application of polymorphic genetic markers, especially single nucleotide polymorphisms, has presented us with a large quantity of genetic data. In this study, we developed the Database of Rheumatoid Arthritis-related Polymorphisms (RADB), to integrate all the RA-related genetic polymorphisms and provide a useful resource for researchers. We manually extracted the RA-related polymorphisms from 686 published reports, including RA susceptibility loci, polymorphisms associated with particular clinical features of RA, polymorphisms associated with drug response in RA and polymorphisms associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease in RA. Currently, RADB V1.0 contains 3235 polymorphisms that are associated with 636 genes and refer to 68 countries. The detailed information extracted from the literature includes basic information about the articles (e.g. PubMed ID, title and abstract), population information (e.g. country, geographic area and sample size) and polymorphism information (e.g. polymorphism name, gene, genotype, odds ratio and 95% confidence interval, P-value and risk allele). Meanwhile, useful annotations, such as hyperlinks to dbSNP, GenBank, UCSC, Gene Ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway, are included. In addition, a tool for meta-analysis was developed to summarize the results of multiple studies. The database is freely available at http://www.bioapp.org/RADB.