Haake et al 2002 through direct or indirect contact with urine soil water or tissues of infected animals ensued by systemic dissemination leptospiremia and disseminate hematogenously. The systemic nature of the infection shows nonspecific symptoms such as headache, fever, chills, muscle pain, vomiting and diarrhea. In addition, a severe form named Weil's syndrome has clinical manifestations including jaundice meningitis, pulmonary, hemorrhage hepatic and renal dysfunction and cardiovascular collapse. The Leptospira genus is divided into species and then further into more than 260 serovars based on the structural heterogeneity in the carbohydrate component of their lipopolysaccharide LPS. Additionally DNA DNA hybridization has divided the genus into 22 species Leptospira spp have relatively large genome between 3.8 to 4.6 Mb with at least two circular replicons with an average GC content of 35 to 45 Picardeau 2015. With the increasing number of genomes sequenced the current challenge is to decipher the meaningful knowledge and features of biological significance. Leptospirosis mimics symptoms with other diseases like dengue malaria typhoid. So diagnosis based on symptoms is unreliable for specific identification. In addition due to the ubiquitous nature of the disease availability of accurate effective and efficient methods for early detection is a prerequisite. Hence laboratory diagnosis is vital to obtain conclusive results. Even after crossing a century of the discovery of Leptospira and in the post-genomic era the concept of universal leptospiral vaccine still remains a long term goal. No alternatives for classical immunization, strategies are available till date which confers only short term immunity restricted to serovars with a need of booster doses and severe side effects. Currently, bacterins are widely available for animals but only a few countries allow their commercialization for humans to use Ben Adler 2015. To overcome the drawbacks efforts need to be focused on the development of a multi epitope-based cross-reactive vaccine. In recent years the frequency of leptospiral infection has steadily grown and non-availability of anti leptospiral drugs demands rigorous research.
Although already available antibiotics like doxycycline cephalosporins and penicillin are administered no statistically significant evidence seems to be available that suggests the benefit of antibiotic therapy in the treatment of severe leptospirosis. Moreover, the course of drug development is multifaceted which may take several years for delivering the specific anti leptospiral drugs. Thus in silico approaches are beneficial in revealing potential drug and vaccine candidates. Only few generalized databanks are available for retrieval of Leptospira sequence data and annotations including the NCBI. Nonetheless, these generalized databases are a valuable resources like LepBank which is a sequence repository and focused on systematics which makes its scope limited. Lately, the link of LepBank does not work. However to the best of our knowledge no resource exquisitely exists for comparative genomics, diagnostics, therapeutics and related analysis of Leptospira. Over the years the growth of Leptospira data has been exponential and sporadic so there appears to be a need to develop a resource that integrates multi-faceted data and necessary analysis tools at a single platform facilitating stronger interpretation and inferences. The development of the LeptoDB interface has been tailored to provide bioinformatics experts and bench biologists with a comprehensive collection of up to date multi-omics curated data with customized sophisticated interactive tools.
These data can be readily used in large scale studies. The current release of the database consists of genome data of more than 460 genomes encompassing 1.68 million proteins. Additionally, the genome data is accompanied by the phylogenetic tree of the constituent organisms based on 16s RNA gene. To the best of the author's knowledge, there exists no publicly available resource which provides manually curated data on Leptospiral drug targets currently which counts to 38 in our resource. Our database resource provides data on CRISPR systems and Genomic Islands for 16 complete genomes. Acetylation is one of the important post-translational modifications after phosphorylation. So database have been integrated with whole proteome 3654 proteins acetylation of Leptospira interrogans serovar. Copenhagen Considering potential utilities of antigenic proteins and their epitopes in the vast area of therapeutics curated data of 37 epitopes for 13 antigenic proteins have been integrated. We foresee this platform as assistance to accelerate research in leptospirosis. The detailed tutorial have been provided with stepwise instructions for the use of this system and underlying databases.
