XDOM, A GRAPHICAL TOOL TO ANALYZE DOMAIN ARRANGEMENTS IN ANY SET OF PROTEIN SEQUENCES

Motivation: To extract the maximum possible information from a set of protein sequences, its modular organization must be known and clearly displayed. This is important both for structural and functional analys is. Results: This paper presents an algorithm and a graphical interfac e called XDOM which performs a systematic analysis of the modular orga nization of any set of protein sequences. The algorithm is an automati c method to identify putative domains from sequence comparisons. The g raphical tool displays the proteins as a set of linked boxes, cor resp onding to its domains. The method has been tested on a family of bacte rial proteins and on whole genomes. It is currently applied to the com plete SWISS-PROT database to build the PRODOM database. Availability: XDOM is available fi-ee of charge by anonymous ftp: {{ftp://ftp.toulou se.inra.fr/pub/xdom}}. The ProDom database can be consulted at {{http: //protein.toulouse.inra/fr/prodom.html}}. Contact: E-mail: {{mailto:fc orpet@toulouse.inra.fr}}.