title: The PRINTS database: a fine-grained protein sequence annotation and analysis resource--its status in 2012.
abstract: The PRINTS database, now in its 21st year, houses a collection of diagnostic protein family 'fingerprints'. Fingerprints are groups of conserved motifs, evident in multiple sequence alignments, whose unique inter-relationships provide distinctive signatures for particular protein families and structural/functional domains. As such, they may be used to assign uncharacterized sequences to known families, and hence to infer tentative functional, structural and/or evolutionary relationships. The February 2012 release (version 42.0) includes 2156 fingerprints, encoding 12 444 individual motifs, covering a range of globular and membrane proteins, modular polypeptides and so on. Here, we report the current status of the database, and introduce a number of recent developments that help both to render a variety of our annotation and analysis tools easier to use and to make them more widely available. Database URL: www.bioinf.manchester.ac.uk/dbbrowser/PRINTS/.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Life Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PT, UK. teresa.k.attwood@manchester.ac.uk
authors.forename: Teresa K
authors.initials: TK
authors.lastname: Attwood
authors.forename: Alain
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Coletta
authors.forename: Gareth
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Muirhead
authors.forename: Athanasia
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pavlopoulou
authors.forename: Peter B
authors.initials: PB
authors.lastname: Philippou
authors.forename: Ivan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Popov
authors.forename: Carlos
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Romá-Mateo
authors.forename: Athina
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Theodosiou
authors.forename: Alex L
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Mitchell
mesh_terms: D020816:Amino Acid Motifs; D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D017124:Conserved Sequence; D030562:Databases, Protein; D006801:Humans; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000235:genetics*; D016415:Sequence Alignment; D014584:User-Computer Interface
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins