Molecular biology sequence database

MedChem/BioByte QSAR Database Microsoft Corp. Molecular biology sequence database Molecular graphics programs at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Molecular Model Types and Rendering Techniques Molecular Simulations Inc. 

Molecular biology sequence database Molecular database Molecular graphics programs... 

The advances in protein, and especially DNA, sequencing technology means that there is now a vast amount of primary structural information relating to biological macromolecules and it is hence essential for laboratories in the field to make use of computers to analyse data on protein and nucleic acid sequences. At present (June 1994) there are more than 80000 sequences in the OWL protein sequence database [8] and there are more than 170000 nucleic acid sequences in the EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory) database [9]. 

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/). 

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]. 

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. 

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. 

GenBank is the NIH genetic sequence database, and an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences. It is part of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration, which comprises the GenBank at NCBI, DNA DataBank of Japan (DDBJ), and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). These three organizations exchange data on a daily basis. 

Part of the EMBL, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is a centre for research and services in bioinformatics. The mission of the EBI is to ensure that information from molecular biology and genome research is placed in the public domain and is accessible freely to all facets of the scientific community. The Institute manages databases of biological data including nucleic acid, protein sequences, and macromolecular structures. 

Databases are electronic filing cabinets that serve as a convenient and efficient means of storing vast amounts of information. An important distinction exists between primary (archival) and secondary (curated) databases. The primary databases represent experimental results with some interpretation. Their record is the sequence as it was experimentally derived. The DNA, RNA, or protein sequences are the items to be computed on and worked with as the valuable components of the primary databases. The secondary databases contain the fruits of analyses of the sequences in the primary sources such as patterns, motifs, functional sites, and so on. Most biochemical and/or molecular biology databases in the public domains are flat-file databases. Each entry of a database is given a unique identifier (i.e., an entry name and/or accession number) so that it can be retrieved uniformly by the combination of the database name and the identifier. 

EMBL—the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (Heidelberg) Nucleotide Sequence Database (also known as EMBL-Bank). The database is produced in an international collaboration with GenBank (USA) and the DNA Database of Japan (DDBJ). The EMBL nucleotide sequence database is part of the Protein and Nucleotide Database Group (PANDA). 

This database provides both protein sequences which are deduced from DNA sequences registered in the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and those from the NBRF/PIR database. 

Liebler DC (2002) Introduction to Proteomics. Tools for the New Biology. Humana Press, Totowa, New Jersey Mann M, Hojrup P, Roepstorff P (1993) Use of mass spectro-metric molecular weight information to identify proteins in sequence databases. Biol Mass Spectrom 22 338-345 Rabilloud T (2000) Proteome Research two dimensional gel electrophoresis and identification methods. Springer Ver-lag, Berlin Heidelberg... 

In fact, a tremendous amount of information is available on the structures of biological macromolecules descriptions of structures of proteins and nucleic acids make up major portions of modern textbooks in biochemistry and molecular biology. The Protein Data Bank and the Nucleic Acid Database are online archives that contain sequence and structural data on thousands of specific molecules and complexes of molecules. This structural information comes from in vitro experiments, with structures inferred from the x-ray diffraction patterns of crystallized molecules, spectroscopic measurements using multi-dimensional nuclear magnetic resonance, and a host of other methodologies. 

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