PRINTS prepares for the new millennium

PRINTS is a diagnostic collection of protein fingerprints. Fingerprints exp loit groups of motifs to build characteristic family signatures, offering i mproved diagnostic reliability over single-motif approaches by virtue of th e mutual context provided by motif neighbours. Around 1000 fingerprints hav e now been created and stored in PRINTS. The September 1998 release (versio n 20.0), encodes similar to 5700 motifs, covering a range of globular and m embrane proteins, modular polypeptides and so on. The database is accessibl e via the DbBrowser Web Server at http://www.biochem. ucl.ac.uk/bsm/dbbrows er/. In addition to supporting its continued growth, recent enhancements to the resource include a BLAST server, and more efficient fingerprint search software, with improved statistics for estimating the reliability of retri eved matches. Current efforts are focused on the design of more automated m ethods for database maintenance; implementation of an object-relational sch ema for efficient data management; and integration with PROSITE, profiles, Pfam and ProDom, as part of the international InterPro project, which aims to unify protein pattern databases and offer improved tools for genome anal ysis.