Novel developments with the PRINTS protein fingerprint database

The PRINTS database of protein family 'fingerprints' is a diagnostic resource that complements the PROSITE dictionary of sites and patterns. Unlike regular expressions, fingerprints exploit groups of conserved motifs within sequence alignments to build characteristic signatures of family membership. Thus fingerprints inherently offer improved diagnostic reliability by virtue of the mutual context provided by motif neighbours. To date, 600 fingerprints have been constructed and stored in PRINTS, representing a 50% increase in the size of the database in the last year. The current version, 13.0, encodes similar to 3000 motifs, covering a range of globular and membrane proteins, modular polypeptides, and so on, The database is accessible via UCL's Bioinformatics World Wide Web (WWW) server at http://www.biochem.ucl.ac.uk/bsm/dbbrowser/. We describe here progress with the database, its Web interface, and a recent exciting development: the integration of a novel colour alignment editor (http://www.biochem.ucl.ac.uk/bsm/dbbrowser/CINEMA), which allows visualisation and interactive manipulation of PRINTS alignments over the Internet.