NOVEL DEVELOPMENTS WITH THE PRINTS PROTEIN FINGERPRINT DATABASE

The PRINTS database of protein family 'fingerprints' is a diagnostic r esource that complements the PROSITE dictionary of sites and patterns. Unlike regular expressions, fingerprints exploit groups of conserved motifs within sequence alignments to build characteristic signatures o f family membership. Thus fingerprints inherently offer improved diagn ostic reliability by virtue of the mutual context provided by motif ne ighbours. To date, 600 fingerprints have been constructed and stored i n PRINTS, representing a 50% increase in the size of the database in t he last year. The current version, 13.0, encodes similar to 3000 motif s, covering a range of globular and membrane proteins, modular polypep tides, and so on, The database is accessible via UCL's Bioinformatics World Wide Web (WWW) server at http://www.biochem.ucl.ac.uk/bsm/dbbrow ser/. We describe here progress with the database, its Web interface, and a recent exciting development: the integration of a novel colour a lignment editor ttp://www.biochem.ucl.ac.uk/bsm/dbbrowser/CINEMA), whi ch allows visualisation and interactive manipulation of PRINTS alignme nts over the Internet.