The PRINTS database of protein fingerprints: a novel information resource for computational molecular biology.

PRINTS is a compendium of protein motif fingerprints derived from the OWL composite sequence database. Fingerprints are groups of motifs within sequence alignments whose conserved nature allows them to be used as signatures of family membership. Fingerprints inherently offer improved diagnostic reliability over single motif methods by virtue of the mutual context provided by motif neighbors. To date, 650 fingerprints have been constructed and stored in PRINTS, the size of which has doubled in the last 2 years. The current version, 14.0, encodes 3500 motifs, covering a range of globular and membrane proteins, modular polypeptides, and so on. The database is now accessible via the UCL Bioinformatics Server on http:@ www.biochem.ucl.ac.uk/bsm/dbbrowser/. We describe here progress with the database, its compilation and interrogation software, and its Web interface.