The PRINTS database: a fine-grained protein sequence annotation and analysis resource-its status in 2012
DATABASE-THE JOURNAL OF BIOLOGICAL DATABASES AND CURATION, vol.2012, 2012 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
- Publication Type: Article / Article
- Volume: 2012
- Publication Date: 2012
- Doi Number: 10.1093/database/bas019
- Journal Name: DATABASE-THE JOURNAL OF BIOLOGICAL DATABASES AND CURATION
- Journal Indexes: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus
- Dokuz Eylül University Affiliated: No
Abstract
The PRINTS database, now in its 21st year, houses a collection of diagnostic protein family 'fingerprints'. Fingerprints are groups of conserved motifs, evident in multiple sequence alignments, whose unique inter-relationships provide distinctive signatures for particular protein families and structural/functional domains. As such, they may be used to assign uncharacterized sequences to known families, and hence to infer tentative functional, structural and/or evolutionary relationships. The February 2012 release (version 42.0) includes 2156 fingerprints, encoding 12 444 individual motifs, covering a range of globular and membrane proteins, modular polypeptides and so on. Here, we report the current status of the database, and introduce a number of recent developments that help both to render a variety of our annotation and analysis tools easier to use and to make them more widely available.