Protein Databases

Proteins are sources of many peptides with diverse biological activity. Some of them are considered as valuable components of foods and drug targets with desired and designed biological activity. We are now entering an era rich in biological data in which the field of bioinformatics is poised to exploit this information in increasingly powerful ways. There are currently many databases all over the world housing information that floods from the genome project. Nevertheless, as databases become more comprehensive, as the volume of sequence data expands and search outputs become more complex, the different databases play an increasingly major role in the post genomic era. However, the rate of sequence generation and overwhelmingly proliferation of databases have made it difficult to keep up with developments. Researchers now need rapid, easy to use, reliable tools for their use in functional characterization of newly determined sequences. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview on the status of protein databases available in the World Wide Web. As this is a fast moving area, a list of all the mentioned databases along with their current URLs are presented in a table at the end of the article.