Adenosiland: Walking through adenosine receptors landscape

Adenosine receptors (ARs) belong to the family of G protein-coupled receptors. Four distinct subtypes are known, termed adenosine A(1), A(2A), A(2B) and A(3). receptors and they are regulated by adenosine which is one of the most ancient and widespread chemical messengers in the animal and plant kingdoms. Moreover, ARs are widely distributed in human body and they are expressed with different density in diverse tissues. It is not surprising that they are involved in the regulation of several physiopathological processes. Adenosiland represents the first tentative of an integrated bioinformatics and chemoinformatics web-resource dedicated to adenosine receptors. This informatics platform provides a wide-ranging of structure based and ligand based query functions to facilitate the exploration of adenosine receptor structures from primary sequences to three-dimensional architectures. Here, we present an overview of Adenosiland platform describing the most valuable searching tools and their functionalities. Adenosiland can be freely accessed at http://mms.dsfarm.unipd.it/Adenosiland/. (C) 2012 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.