MOTIVATION: InterPro is a new integrated documentation resource for protein families, domains and functional sites, developed initially as a means of rationalising the complementary efforts of the PROSITE, PRINTS, Pfam and ProDom database projects. RESULTS: 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. Release 1.2 of InterPro (June 2000) contains over 3000 entries, representing families, domains, repeats and sites of post-translational modification (PTMs) encoded by 6581 different regular expressions, profiles, fingerprints and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). Each InterPro entry lists all the matches against SWISS-PROT and TrEMBL (more than 1000000 hits from 264333 different proteins out of 384572 in SWISS-PROT and TrEMBL).

Abstract Motivation: Multiple alignments of protein sequences are the basis of structural and functional analysis of protein families. It is however difficult even for an expert biologist to comprehend an alignment of more than 50 to 100 homologous sequences. Results: This paper presents a browser for the analysis of multiple alignments of large numbers of protein sequences. Phylogenetic trees and consensus sequences are computed and used to summarise the alignments; these data are stored in a structure called Rich Family Description. Summary alignments and trees are displayed in HTML pages and can be developed or reduced by the user. This browser is used to display the ProDom domain families on the Web. Its zooming facilities allow extracting information from alignments of more than 1000 homologous sequences. Availability: Programs are available free of charge on request from the authors. The ProDom database can be consulted at http://www.toulouse.inra.fr/prodom.html Contact: [email protected]

MOTIVATION: To extract the maximum possible information from a set of protein sequences, its modular organization must be known and clearly displayed. This is important both for structural and functional analysis. RESULTS: This paper presents an algorithm and a graphical interface called XDOM which performs a systematic analysis of the modular organization of any set of protein sequences. The algorithm is an automatic method to identify putative domains from sequence comparisons. The graphical tool displays the proteins as a set of linked boxes, corresponding to its domains. The method has been tested on a family of bacterial proteins and on whole genomes. It is currently applied to the complete SWISS-PROT database to build the PRODOM database. AVAILABILITY: XDOM is available free of charge by anonymous ftp:¿¿ftp://ftp.toulouse.inra.fr/pub/xdom¿ ¿. The ProDom database can be consulted at ¿¿http://protein.toulouse.inra.fr/prodom.html¿¿.

We have developed an algorithm and a computer program for aligning new RNA sequences with a bank of aligned homologous RNA sequences. Given a common folding structure for the bank, the program performs an alignment between the bank and a new sequence, optimal both in terms of primary and secondary structure. This method is useful to align sequences that present a common folding structure despite extensive divergence of their primary structures. It allows these preserved regions to be precisely distinguished from domains with more variable secondary structure. An optimal alignment of a sequence of length N with a bank of homologous sequences of length M is produced in O (M2N3) time and O(M2N2) space. For sequences that are too long for an algorithm of this complexity, a proposed strategy is to use a classical alignment (using only primary structure data) then improve it with the new algorithm in the regions where the bank stems are not aligned with possible stems in the new sequence. The algorithm has been implemented in Turbo Pascal on a PC, and has been used to align RNA sequences of eubacterial large ribosomal subunit.