Biomedical subjects

A Gaulton

Publications and source records attributed to A Gaulton.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2003

PRINTS and its automatic supplement, prePRINTS.

The PRINTS database houses a collection of protein fingerprints. These may be used to assign uncharacterised sequences to known families and hence to infer tentative functions. The September 2002 release (version 36.0) includes 1800 fingerprints, encoding approximately 11 000 motifs, covering a range of globular and membrane proteins, modular polypeptides and so on. In addition to its continued steady growth, we report here the development of an automatic supplement, prePRINTS, designed to increase the coverage of the resource and reduce some of the manual burdens inherent in its maintenance. The databases are accessible for interrogation and searching at http://www.bioinf.man.ac.uk/dbbrowser/PRINTS/.

Amino Acid Motifs↗

PubMed2002

PRINTS and PRINTS-S shed light on protein ancestry.

The PRINTS database houses a collection of protein fingerprints. These may be used to make family and tentative functional assignments for uncharacterised sequences. The September 2001 release (version 32.0) includes 1600 fingerprints, encoding approximately 10 000 motifs, covering a range of globular and membrane proteins, modular polypeptides and so on. In addition to its continued steady growth, we report here its use as a source of annotation in the InterPro resource, and the use of its relational cousin, PRINTS-S, to model relationships between families, including those beyond the reach of conventional sequence analysis approaches. The database is accessible for BLAST, fingerprint and text searches at http://www.bioinf.man.ac.uk/dbbrowser/PRINTS/.

Amino Acid Motifs↗

PubMed2002

Deriving structural and functional insights from a ligand-based hierarchical classification of G protein-coupled receptors.

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) constitute the largest known family of cell-surface receptors. With hundreds of members populating the rhodopsin-like GPCR superfamily and many more awaiting discovery in the human genome, they are of interest to the pharmaceutical industry because of the opportunities they afford for yielding potentially lucrative drug targets. Typical sequence analysis strategies for identifying novel GPCRs tend to involve similarity searches using standard primary database search tools. This will reveal the most similar sequence, generally without offering any insight into its family or superfamily relationships. Conversely, searches of most 'pattern' or family databases are likely to identify the superfamily, but not the closest matching subtype. Here we describe a diagnostic resource that allows identification of GPCRs in a hierarchical fashion, based principally upon their ligand preference. This resource forms part of the PRINTS database, which now houses approximately 250 GPCR-specific fingerprints (http://www.bioinf.man.ac.uk/dbbrowser/gpcrPRINTS/). This collection of fingerprints is able to provide more sensitive diagnostic opportunities than have been realized by related approaches and is currently the only diagnostic tool for assigning GPCR subtypes. Mapping such fingerprints on to three-dimensional GPCR models offers powerful insights into the structural and functional determinants of subtype specificity.

Algorithms↗