Molecular biology databases

Many biochemical databases with sophisticated topics have been developed for solving various problems. Since 1996 the first issue of each journal volume of Nucleic Acid Research has been reserved for the presentation of molecular biology databases [28]. A comprehensive catalog on the Internet is DBCAT, currently listing 511 databases [29, 30). 

EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory) [33] is a nucleotide sequence database provided from the online host EBl. Release 73 (December, 2002) consists of over 20 million nucleotide sequences with more than 28 billion nucleotides. The information includes sequence name, species, sequence length, promoter, taxonomy, and nucleic acid sequence. 

Murzin A G, S E Brenner, T Hubbard and C Chothia 1995. SCOP A Structural Classification of Proteins Database for the Investigation of Sequences and Structures. Journal of Molecular Biology 247 536-540. 

The World Wide Web has transformed the way in which we obtain and analyze published information on proteins. What only a few years ago would take days or weeks and require the use of expensive computer workstations can now be achieved in a few minutes or hours using personal computers, both PCs and Macintosh, connected to the internet. The Web contains hundreds of sites of Interest to molecular biologists, many of which are listed in Pedro s BioMolecular Research Tools (http // www.fmi.ch/biology/research tools.html). Many sites provide free access to databases that make it very easy to obtain information on structurally related proteins, the amino acid sequences of homologous proteins, relevant literature references, medical information and metabolic pathways. This development has opened up new opportunities for even non-specialists to view and manipulate a structure of interest or to carry out amino-acid sequence comparisons, and one can now rapidly obtain an overview of a particular area of molecular biology. We shall here describe some Web sites that are of interest from a structural point of view. Updated links to these sites can be found in the Introduction to Protein Structure Web site (http // WWW.ProteinStructure.com/). 

Scherf U, Ross DT, Waltham M, Smith LH, Lee JK, Tanabe L et al. A gene expression database for the molecular biology of cancer. Nat Genet 2000 24 236-44. 

Due to the ready accessibility of SH2 domains by molecular biology techniques, numerous experimentally determined 3D structures of SH2 domains derived by X-ray crystallography as well as heteronuclear multidimensional NMR spectroscopy are known today. The current version of the protein structure database, accessible to the scientific community by, e.g., the Internet (http //www.rcsb.org/pdb/) contains around 80 entries of SH2 domain structures and complexes thereof. Today, the SH2 domain structures of Hck [62], Src [63-66], Abl [67], Grb2 [68-71], Syp [72], PLCy [73], Fyn [74], SAP [75], Lck [76,77], the C- and N-terminal SH2 domain ofp85a [78-80], and of the tandem SH2 domains Syk [81,82], ZAP70 [83,84], and SHP-2 [85] are determined. All SH2 domains display a conserved 3D structure as can be expected from multiple sequence alignments (Fig. 4). The common structural fold consists of a central three-stranded antiparallel ft sheet that is occasionally extended by one to three additional short strands (Fig. 5). This central ft sheet forms the spine of the domain which is flanked on both sides by regular a helices [49, 50,60]. 

EMBL (http //www.ebi.ac.uk/embl), database of the European Bioinformatics Institute, a part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. 

European dynamic filter, 11 384 European Inventory of Existing Chemical Substances (EINECS), 26 901 European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) database, 12 512 European patent, 18 198 European Patent Classification (ECLA) scheme, 18 209, 230 European Patent Convention (EPC), 18 189, 191... 

Johnson R.S. and Taylor J.A. (2000), Searching sequence databases via de novo peptide sequencing by tandem mass spectrometry, in Methods in Molecular Biology, Vol. 146, Mass Spectrometry of Proteins and Peptides, pp. 41-61, Chapman J.R., Ed., Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. 

Protein primary structure databases include the following ExPASy Molecular Biology Server (Swiss-Prot) expasy.ch/ Protein Information resources (PIR) pir.georgetown.edu Protein Research Foundation (PRF) prf.or.jp/en/os.html. 

Selected entries from Methods in Enzymology [vol, page(s)] Databases and Resources Information services of European Bioinformatics Institute, 266, 3 TDB new databases for biological discovery, 266, 27 PIR-international protein sequence database, 266, 41 superfamily classification in PIR-international protein sequence database, 266, 59 gene classification artificial neural system, 266, 71 blocks database and its applications, 266, 88 indexing and using sequence databases, 266, 105 SRS information retrieval system for molecular biology data banks, 266, 114. 

Searching through Databases Applications of network BLAST server, 266, 131 Entrez molecular biology database and retrieval system, 266, 141 applying motif and profile searches,... 

The ENZYME nomenclature database, a repository of information based on the recommendations of the Nomenclature Committee of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (NC-IUBMB), currently contains 4435 enzyme entries (Release 38.0, September 2005). Of these, 545 entries are superseded, resulting in a final list of 3,890 enzymes, 224 sub-subclasses, and 65 subclasses. 

High-speed identification from either PMF or MS/MS data can be achieved from non-redundant protein databases (Mann ef a/., 2001). These often include valuable annotations giving insight into functions of isolated and identified proteins. Many of these databases, such as NCBInr (National Centre for Biotechnology Information) and Swiss Prot (ExPASy Molecular Biology Server), can be used for protein identification. 

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