AntibioticDB: An Updated and Improved Open-Access Database for the Antibacterial Research and Development Community

AntibioticDB (https://www.antibioticdb.com/), originally established in 2017 and since 2021 led by the Global Antibiotic Research & Development Partnership (GARDP), is a freely available database of antibacterial agents to facilitate research and development of new antibacterial therapeutics. Here, we describe a new release of AntibioticDB that has been significantly expanded and updated with the aid of user feedback and which offers additional functionality through a redesigned web portal. Improvements include reciprocal integration with the IUPHAR/BPS Guide to Pharmacology (https://www.guidetopharmacology.org), capturing of compound structure information in the form of standard chemical identifiers (canonical and isomeric SMILES, InChI, and InChI Key), chemical 2D structure images, and harmonizing terminology to optimize database searching. Ongoing curation efforts have increased the number of individual entries to >3,500, a process driven mostly by a significant expansion of historical natural product antibiotics that were previously under-represented in the database. The database is continuously updated by mining the published literature and capturing newly discovered antibacterial compounds as they are reported, making AntibioticDB the most complete global resource on antibacterial agents.