BoMiProt is a manually curated, exclusive repository of comprehensive information on experimentally characterized protein found in bovine milk. Each entry in BoMiProt has a unique identifier BoMiProt ID and categorized according to different fraction of bovine milk, whey, fat globule membrane and exosomes. In this database, 10642 proteins have been included with primary information, 1789 of which are provided with detailed protein annotations including protein function, biochemical properties, PTMs’, functional role, significance of the protein in milk and Hierarchical classification structural information. These well annotated proteins with secondary information are called as ‘BoMiProt defined proteins’ in the database. This is an in-depth bovine milk proteome reference database that provides a bird’s eye view of the on-going research on bovine milk and possible information gaps that needs attention for maximizing health promoting effects of milk and different dairy products in a positive way.

Recently, improvements in the sensitivity of MS to an unprecedented scale have significantly contributed to investigate changes in protein abundance and milk composition due to endogenous (e.g. breeds & lactation stages), exogenous (e.g. seasons) factors and diseases. Thus, a better understanding of the bovine milk proteome will not only enable us to improve animal health and well-being through appropriate veterinary and husbandry practices but also helps us focus on different dairy products (e.g. cheese, yoghurt, butter) for the betterment of human health. To meet the growing interest in research in bovine milk proteome carried out by different groups, BoMiProt is the first focused step towards consolidating prior data and/or report the degree of overlap with previously published literature.

To the best of our knowledge, BoMiProt is the first manually curated, exclusive database of experimentally detected/characterized proteins of bovine milk origin. Though parts of the data available at BoMiProt can be retrieved at UniProt or NCBI yet unlike all these repositories BoMiProt is an exclusive compilation of experimentally validated proteins instrumental in different economic and nutritional impacts of bovine milk. Furthermore, BoMiProt provides milk specific significance of the proteins along with other additional interesting information on function, biochemical properties, PTMs and their roles and structures.

In last 3 decades, a lot of interest is generated in studying bovine milk proteins. To date, over 448 publications have reported change in bovine milk composition based on season, lactation stages, breeds, health status and milk fractions while there are no reports on the consolidation or overlap of the existing data. Interestingly, in the last 30 years, almost 70% of the researchers of bovine milk have focused on whey proteins followed by MFGM (20%) and exosomes (10%). Although manual curation is a tedious process, we have tried to build up a wealth of information of secondary information extracted from more than 3400 publications on different proteins to set a stage for future studies on the dynamics and the complexities of bovine milk proteome. BoMiProt has a broad coverage on the primary information for all the entries including biologically and experimentally relevant information for a significant number of BoMiProt defined proteins. This provides an updated and realistic estimate of the extent of ongoing research in bovine milk proteome. The biggest advantage is that BoMiProt is the first database with a BLAST tool that will be very useful for characterization of query milk protein sequences and retrieval of homologous sequences from the database, based on sequence similarity especially when results cannot be retrieved by a ‘general search’. It also facilitates downloading a complete non-redundant bovine milk proteome in FASTA format to be used in different fields such as mass spectrometry.

Although, BoMiProt has curated over 10642 proteins, secondary information on proteins are limited to 1789 proteins due to scarcity of relevant existing literature.

The future versions of the database will aim at introducing in-depth information on milk proteome along with continued compilation of defined and undefined proteins under respective sections and enhanced structural/image inputs for proteins in BoMiProt.