The ASTRAL compendium for protein structure and sequence analysis

The ASTRAL compendium provides several databases and tools to aid in the analysis of protein structures, particularly through the use of their sequences. The SPACI scores included in the system summarize the overall characteristics of a protein structure. A structural alignments database indicates residue equivalencies in superimposed protein domain structures. The PDB sequence-map files provide a linkage between the amino acid sequence of the molecule studied (SEQRES records in a database entry) and the sequence of the atoms experimentally observed in the structure (ATOM records). These maps are combined with information in the SCOPdatabase to provide sequences of protein domains. Selected subsets of the domain database, with varying degrees of similarity measured in several different ways, are also available. ASTRALmay be accessed at http://astral.stanford.edu/