PROSITE

PROSITE is a database of protein families and domains. It consists of documentation entries describing protein domains, families and functional sites as well as associated patterns and profiles to identify them. These are manually curated by a team of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and tightly integrated into Swiss-Prot protein annotation. PROSITE was created in 1988 by Amos Bairoch.

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Its uses include identifying possible functions of newly-discovered proteins and analysis of known proteins for previously undetermined activity. PROSITE offers tools for sequence analysis and motif detection (see sequence motif). It is part of the ExPASy proteomics analysis servers.

The database ProRule builds on the domain descriptions of PROSITE. It provides additional information about functionally and/or structurally critical amino acids. The rules contain information about biologically meaningful residues, like active sites, binding sites, post-translational modification sites or disulfide bonds, to help function determination. These can automatically generate annotation based on PROSITE motifs.

See also

• Uniprot the universal protein database, a central resource on protein information - PROSITE adds data to it.
• InterPro a centralized database, grouping data from databases of protein families, domains and functional sites - part of the data come from PROSITE.
• Protein subcellular localization prediction another example of use of PROSITE.

References

• Hulo N., Bairoch A., Bulliard V., Cerutti L., Cuche B., De Castro E., Lachaize C., Langendijk-Genevaux P.S., Sigrist C.J.A. (2007). "The 20 years of PROSITE.". Nucleic Acids Res.. PMID 18003654.

• De Castro E., Sigrist C.J.A., Gattiker A., Bulliard V., Langendijk-Genevaux P.S., Gasteiger E., Bairoch A., Hulo N. (2006). "ScanProsite: detection of PROSITE signature matches and ProRule-associated functional and structural residues in proteins.". Nucleic Acids Res. 34(Web Server issue): W362-365. PMID 16845026.

• Sigrist CJ, De Castro E, Langendijk-Genevaux PS, Le Saux V, Bairoch A, Hulo N. (2005). "ProRule: a new database containing functional and structural information on PROSITE profiles.". Bioinformatics. 21(21): 4060-4066. PMID 16091411.