Chapter 59 - Bioinformatic Resources for in Silico Proteome Analysis

Abstract

Biomolecular databases are, in combination with database search tools and tools for the computational analysis of the data, invaluable resources for biological and medical research. Their importance is ever increasing, especially as much data are no longer published in conventional publications, but are only available from databases. Protein sequence databases store information on proteins. Here it has to be distinguished between universal databases covering proteins from all species and specialized data collections storing information about specific families or groups of proteins or about the proteins of a specific organism. Two categories of universal protein sequence databases can be discerned: simple archives of sequence data and annotated databases where additional information has been added to the sequence record. The number of known protein structures is increasing very rapidly and these are available through PDB, the Protein Data Bank. PDB represents the single worldwide repository for the processing and distribution of three-dimensional biological macromolecular structure data, gained by techniques of X-ray crystal structure determination, nuclear magnetic resonancy, cryoelectron microscopy, and theoretical modeling.