Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), naturally encoded from genes and generally contained 10–100 amino acids, are crucial components of the innate immune system and can protect the host from various pathogenic bacteria, as well as viruses. In recent years, the widespread use of antibiotics has inspired the rapid growth of antibiotic-resistant microorganisms that usually induce critical infection and pathogenesis. An increasing interest therefore was motivated to explore natural AMPs that enable the development of new antibiotics. With the potential of AMPs being as new drugs for multidrug-resistant pathogens, we were thus motivated to develop a database (dbAMP, http://csb.cse.yzu.edu.tw/dbAMP/) by accumulating comprehensive AMPs from public domain and manually curating literature. Currently in dbAMP there are 12 389 unique entries, including 4271 experimentally verified AMPs and 8118 putative AMPs along with their functional activities, supported by 1924 research articles. The advent of high-throughput biotechnologies, such as mass spectrometry and next-generation sequencing, has led us to further expand dbAMP as a database-assisted platform for providing comprehensively functional and physicochemical analyses for AMPs based on the large-scale transcriptome and proteome data. Significant improvements available in dbAMP include the information of AMP–protein interactions, antimicrobial potency analysis for ‘cryptic’ region detection, annotations of AMP target species, as well as AMP detection on transcriptome and proteome datasets. Additionally, a Docker container has been developed as a downloadable package for discovering known and novel AMPs on high-throughput omics data. The user-friendly visualization interfaces have been created to facilitate peptide searching, browsing, and sequence alignment against dbAMP entries. All the facilities integrated into dbAMP can promote the functional analyses of AMPs and the discovery of new antimicrobial drugs.

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Objective To improve the quality of health care, the Ministry of Health and Welfare of Taiwan start to launch a project in June 2015, providing community outreach services and outpatient psychiatric treatment to schools, institutions for child and adolescent patients with mental disabilities. The main purpose of this study was to analyze the development of the project and intended to promote medical service quality for child and adolescent patients. Methods Service team members from eight medical centers and psychiatric hospitals in Taiwan, providing both outreach community services and outpatient psychiatric treatment. We collected the personal information and assessment scale scores of all patients from January 2016 to December 2021 (N = 432). Results The findings revealed significant improvement in the scores of C-GAS, PSP, CGI-S, and CGI-I (p < 0.001). The scores of the self-reported assessment scale ASEBA also showed significant improvement for internalizing problems, externalizing problems and total problems (p < 0.001). Most of the disabled children and adolescents have benefited greatly from this project, including presenting less disruptive behavior, fewer hospital readmissions, and more improved adaptation. Discussion This 6-year community-based follow-up treatment shows that the majority of disabled patients continue experiencing an improved condition after intervention.

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