PRINTS - A PROTEIN MOTIF FINGERPRINT DATABASE

The PRINTS database of protein 'fingerprints' is described. Fingerprin ts comprise sets of moths excised from conserved regions of sequence a lignments, their diagnostic power or potency being refined by iterativ e database scanning (in this case the OWL composite sequence database) . Generally, the motifs do not overlap, but are separated along a sequ ence, though they may be contiguous in 3-D space. The use of groups of independent, linearly or spatially separate moths allows particular p rotein folds and functionalities to be characterized more flexibly and powerfully than conventional single-component patterns or regular exp ressions. The current version of the database (4.0) contains 150 entri es (encoding >700 motifs), covering a wide range of globular and membr ane proteins, modular polypeptides and so on. The growth of the databa se is influenced by a number of factors, e.g. the use of multiple moti fs, the maximization of sequence information through iterative databas e scanning and the fact that the database searched is a large composit e. The information contained within PRINTS is distinct from but comple mentary to the single consensus expressions stored in the widely used PROSITE dictionary of patterns.