MOTIVATION: Databases of sequenced genomes are widely used to characterize the structure, function and evolutionary relationships of proteins. The ability to discern such relationships is widely expected to grow as sequencing projects provide novel information, bridging gaps in our map of the protein universe. RESULTS: We have plotted our progress in protein sequencing over the last two decades and found that the rate of novel sequence discovery is in a sustained period of decline. Consequently, PSI-BLAST, the most widely used method to detect remote evolutionary relationships, which relies upon the accumulation of novel sequence data, is now showing a plateau in performance. We interpret this trend as signalling our approach to a representative map of the protein universe and discuss its implications.

MOTIVATION: The output of a bioinformatic tool such as BLAST must usually be interpreted by an expert before reliable conclusions can be drawn. This may be based upon the expert's experience, additional data and statistical analysis. Often the process is laborious, goes unrecorded and may be biased. Argumentation is an established technique for reasoning about situations where absolute truth or precise probability is impossible to determine. RESULTS: We demonstrate the application of argumentation to 3D-PSSM, a protein structure prediction tool. The expert's interpretation of results is represented as an argumentation framework. Given a 3D-PSSM result, an automated procedure constructs arguments for and against the conclusion that the result is a good predictor of protein structure. In addition to capturing the unique expertise of the author of 3D-PSSM for distribution to users, an improvement in recall of 5-10 percentage points is achieved. This technique can be applied to a wide range of bioinformatic tools. AVAILABILITY: Example public server and benchmarking data are available at http://www.sbg.bio.ic.ac.uk/~brj03/argumentation/paper/. Source code available on request.

MOTIVATION: Sequence database search methods often identify putative sub-threshold hits of known function or structure for a given query sequence. It is widespread practice to filter these hits by hand using knowledge of function and other factors; to the expert, some hits may appear more sensible than others. SAWTED (Structure Assignment With Text Description) is an automated solution to this post-filtering problem which will be applicable to large scale genome assignments. RESULTS: A standard document comparison algorithm is applied to text descriptions extracted from SWISS-PROT annotations. The added value of SAWTED in combination with PSI-BLAST has been shown with a benchmark of difficult remote homologues taken from the SCOP structure database. AVAILABILITY: A WAWTED PSI-BLAST Web server is available to perform sensitive searches against the protein structure database (http://www.bmm.icnet.uk/servers/sawted). CONTACT: [email protected]

A method (3D-PSSM) to recognise remote protein sequence homologues is described.The method uses homologous proteins of similar three-dimensional structure in the SCOP database (Murzin, A. G. et al., 1995, J. Mol.Biol.247, 536-540) to obtain a structural equivalence of residues.These equivalences are used to extend multiply-aligned sequences obtained by standard sequence searches (i.e.lDprofiles).The resultant 3D profile is converted into a position specific scoring matrix (a 3D-PSSM).The approach is benchmarked on recognising remote homologues in the SCOP database and comparing the hit and error rates.3D-PSSMs are compared with lD-PSSMs and with two widely-used sensitive search approaches -PSI-BLAST (Altschul, S. F., et al