The Antimicrobial Peptide Database (APD) was originally created by a graduate student, Zhe Wang, as his master's thesis in the laboratory of Dr. Guangshun Wang. The project was initiated in 2002 and the first version of the database was open to the public in August 2003. It contained 525 peptide entries, which can be searched in multiple ways, including APD ID, peptide name, amino acid sequence, original location, PDB ID, structure, methods for structural determination, peptide length, charge, hydrophobic content, antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, anticancer, and hemolytic activity. Some results of this bioinformatics tool were reported in the 2004 database paper. The peptide data stored in the APD were gleaned from the literature (PubMed, PDB, Google, and Swiss-Prot) manually in over a decade.