title: The Pfam protein families database: towards a more sustainable future.
abstract: In the last two years the Pfam database (http://pfam.xfam.org) has undergone a substantial reorganisation to reduce the effort involved in making a release, thereby permitting more frequent releases. Arguably the most significant of these changes is that Pfam is now primarily based on the UniProtKB reference proteomes, with the counts of matched sequences and species reported on the website restricted to this smaller set. Building families on reference proteomes sequences brings greater stability, which decreases the amount of manual curation required to maintain them. It also reduces the number of sequences displayed on the website, whilst still providing access to many important model organisms. Matches to the full UniProtKB database are, however, still available and Pfam annotations for individual UniProtKB sequences can still be retrieved. Some Pfam entries (1.6%) which have no matches to reference proteomes remain; we are working with UniProt to see if sequences from them can be incorporated into reference proteomes. Pfam-B, the automatically-generated supplement to Pfam, has been removed. The current release (Pfam 29.0) includes 16 295 entries and 559 clans. The facility to view the relationship between families within a clan has been improved by the introduction of a new tool.
authors.affiliation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK rdf@ebi.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Robert D
authors.initials: RD
authors.lastname: Finn
authors.affiliation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK.
authors.forename: Penelope
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Coggill
authors.affiliation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SA, UK.
authors.forename: Ruth Y
authors.initials: RY
authors.lastname: Eberhardt
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology, Harvard University, Biological Laboratories 1008, 16 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
authors.forename: Sean R
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6676-4706
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Eddy
authors.affiliation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK.
authors.forename: Jaina
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Mistry
authors.affiliation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK.
authors.forename: Alex L
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Mitchell
authors.affiliation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK.
authors.forename: Simon C
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Potter
authors.affiliation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK Sorbonne Universités, UPMC-Univ P6, CNRS, Laboratoire de Biologie Computationnelle et Quantitative - UMR 7238, 15 rue de l'Ecole de Médecine, 75006 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Punta
authors.affiliation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK.
authors.forename: Matloob
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Qureshi
authors.affiliation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK.
authors.forename: Amaia
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sangrador-Vegas
authors.affiliation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK.
authors.forename: Gustavo A
authors.initials: GA
authors.lastname: Salazar
authors.affiliation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SA, UK.
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Tate
authors.affiliation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK.
authors.forename: Alex
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bateman
mesh_terms: D030562:Databases, Protein; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D011506:Proteins / Q000145:classification*; D020543:Proteome / Q000737:chemistry*; D016415:Sequence Alignment; D020539:Sequence Analysis, Protein
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins; D020543:Proteome