PROFESS: a PROtein Function, Evolution, Structure and Sequence database

Authors

Thomas Triplet, University of Nebraska- LincolnFollow
Matthew D. Shortridge, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Mark A. Griep, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Jaime L. Stark, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Robert Powers, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Peter Revesz, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

2010

Citation

Database, Vol. 2010, Article ID baq011, doi:10.1093/database/baq011

Comments

Copyright The Author(s) 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. This is Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License

Abstract

The proliferation of biological databases and the easy access enabled by the Internet is having a beneficial impact on biological sciences and transforming the way research is conducted. There are ~1100 molecular biology databases dispersed throughout the Internet. To assist in the functional, structural and evolutionary analysis of the abundant number of novel proteins continually identified from whole-genome sequencing, we introduce the PROFESS (PROtein Function, Evolution, Structure and Sequence) database. Our database is designed to be versatile and expandable and will not confine analysis to a pre-existing set of data relationships. A fundamental component of this approach is the development of an intuitive query system that incorporates a variety of similarity functions capable of generating data relationships not conceived during the creation of the database. The utility of PROFESS is demonstrated by the analysis of the structural drift of homologous proteins and the identification of potential pancreatic cancer therapeutic targets based on the observation of protein–protein interaction networks.