Specialized proteomic databases

MS instruments measure the mass-to-charge ratio (m/z) values of the smallest of molecules very accurately. In addition, the development of translated genomic databases and specialized software algorithms that rapidly search MS data against theoretical spectra of known or predicted proteins within databases is an important component that greatly facilitated the emergence of mass spectrometry-based proteomics as a key approach for large-scale proteomic analysis.15... 

Rather than using an amino acid sequence to search SWISS-PROT, AACompI-dent of ExPASy Proteomic tools (http //www.expasy.ch/tools/) uses the amino acid composition of an unknown protein to identify known proteins of the same composition. The program requires the desired amino acid composition, the pi and molecular weight of the protein (if known), the appropriate taxonomic class, and any special keywords. The user must select from one of six amino acid constellations that influence how the analysis is performed. For each sequence in the database, the algorithm computes a score based on the difference in compositions between the sequence and the query composition. The results, returned by e-mail, are organized as three ranked lists. Because the computed scores are a measure of difference, a score of zero implies that there is exact correspondence between the query compo-... 

We see two major appearing frontiers for new kinds of molecular data. The first is proteomics (See Chapter 4 of volume 2) and metabolomics. With a combination of 2D gel, mass spectrometry, protein microarray and yeast-two-hybrid methods, a large amount of protein sequence, expression, and interaction data will be produced on a cell-wide level. On the one hand, bioinformatics has to address the challenge of interpreting these data. On the other hand, especially the protein interaction data will provide an interesting basis for probing deeper into the details of regulatory networks. Such data are collected in special protein interaction databases such as DIP [9,10] and BIND [11],... 

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