PRINTS-S: the database formerly known as PRINTS

The PRINTS database houses a collection of protein family fingerprints, The se are groups of motifs that together are diagnostically more potent than s ingle motifs by virtue of the biological context afforded by matching motif neighbours, Around 1200 fingerprints have now been created and stored in t he database. The September 1999 release (version 24.0) encodes similar to 7 200 motifs, covering a range of globular and membrane proteins, modular pol ypeptides and so on, In addition to its continued steady growth, we report here several major changes to the resource, including the design of an auto mated strategy for database maintenance, and implementation of an object-re lational schema for more efficient data management, The database is accessi ble for BLAST, fingerprint:and text searches at http://www.bioinf. man.ac.u k/dbbrowser/PRINTS/.