Website review: interPro (the integrated resource of protein domains and functional sites)

The family and motif databases, PROSITE, PRINTS, Pfam and ProDom, have been integrated into a powerful resource for protein secondary annotation. As of June 2000, InterPro had processed 384 572 proteins in SWISS-PROT and TrEMBL. Because the contributing databases have different clustering principles and scoring sensitivities, the combined assignments compliment each other for grouping protein families and delineating domains. The graphic displays of all matches above the scoring thresholds enables judgements to be made on the concordances or differences between the assignments. The website links can be used to analyse novel sequences and for queries across the proteomes of 32 organisms, including the partial human set, by domain and/or protein family. An analysis of selected HtrA/DegQ proteases demonstrates the utility of this website for detailed comparative genomics. Further information on the project can be found at the European Bioinformatics Institute at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/interpro/