SCOP, Structural Classi®cation of Proteins Database: Applications to Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Sequence Alignment Methods and Statistics of Protein Structural Data

The Structural Classi®cation of Proteins (SCOP) database provides a detailed and comprehensive description of the relationships of all known protein structures. The classi®cation is on hierarchical levels: the ®rst two levels, family and superfamily, describe near and far evolutionary relationships; the third, fold, describes geometrical relationships. The distinction between evolutionary relationships and those that arise from the physics and chemistry of proteins is a feature that is unique to this database, so far. The database can be used as a source of data to calibrate sequence search algorithms and for the generation of population statistics on protein structures. The database and its associated ®les are freely accessible from a number of WWW sites mirrored from URL http://scop.mrc-lmb. cam.ac.uk/scop/.