SAWTED: Structure Assignment With Text Description - Enhanced detection, of remote homologues with automated SWISS-PROT annotation comparisons

Motivation: Sequence database search methods often identify putative sub-th reshold hits of known function or structure for a given query sequence. It is widespread practice to filter these hits by hand using knowledge of func tion and other factors; to the expert, some hits may appear more sensible t han others. SAWTED (Structure Assignment With Text Description) is an autom ated solution to this post-filtering problem which will be applicable to la rge scale genome assignments. Results: A standard document comparison algorithm is applied to text descri ptions extracted from SWISS-PROT annotations. The added value of SAWTED in combination with PSI-BLAST has been shown with a benchmark of difficult rem ote homologues taken from the SCOP structure database.