INTERPRO

InterPro is a new integrated documentation resource for protein families, domains and functional sites, developed as a means of rationalising the complementary efforts of the PROSITE, PRINTS, Pfam and ProDom database projects. Merged annotations from PRINTS, PROSITE and Pfam form the InterPro core. Each combined InterPro entry includes functional descriptions and literature references, and links are made back to the relevant parent database(s), allowing users to see at a glance whether a particular family or domain has associated patterns, profiles, fingerprints, etc.. Merged and individual entries (i.e., those that have no counterpart in the companion resources) are assigned unique accession numbers. The first release of InterPro contains around 2,400 entries, representing families, domains, repeats and sites of post-translational modification (PTMs) encoded by 4,300 regular expressions, profiles, fingerprints and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). Each InterPro entry lists all the matches against SWISS-PROT and TrEMBL (more than 370,000 hits in total). The database is accessible for text-based searches at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ interpro/.