PhosCancer: A comprehensive database for investigating protein phosphorylation in human cancer

Abstract

Summary: Protein phosphorylation is a crucial post-translational modification implicated in cancer pathogenesis, offering potential diagnostic and therapeutic targets. Here, we developed PhosCancer, a user-friendly database for extracting biologically and clinically relevant insights from phosphoproteomics data. Leveraging data from the CNHPP and CPTAC, PhosCancer encompasses 174,587 phosphosites from 14 datasets spanning 12 cancer types. Through extensive statistical analyses and integration of annotations from external resources, PhosCancer serves as a convenient one-stop platform facilitating the exploration of phosphorylation profiles across different cancer types. Not only does PhosCancer encompass basic information, 3D structure, functional domains, and upstream kinases, but also provides quantitative associations with nine clinical features, and the relevance with hallmarks in both cancer-specific and pan-cancer views. PhosCancer is a valuable resource for cancer researchers and clinicians, promoting the identification of clinically actionable biomarkers and further facilitating the clinical applications of phosphoproteomic data.

Keywords

• biological database
• cancer
• software tool