InterPro: Quick tour

Classifying proteins into families and identifying important domains and sites is invaluable for helping biologists to identify distantly related proteins and to predict their functions. A daunting array of resources, each with different strengths and weaknesses, is now available for searching genomes and proteomes with ‘protein signatures’ – diagnostic entities that are used to recognise a particular domain [3] or family. InterPro [4] combines protein signatures from multiple, diverse databases into a single searchable resource, capitalising on their individual strengths to produce a powerful integrated database and diagnostic tool for protein sequence classification.