We present FIGfams, a new collection of over 100,000 protein families that are the product of manual curation and close strain comparison. Using the Subsystem approach the manual curation is carried out, ensuring a previously unattained degree of throughput and consistency. FIGfams are based on over 950,000 manually annotated proteins and across many hundred Bacteria and Archaea. Associated wit...

Proteins are essential components of living systems, capable of performing a huge variety of tasks at the molecular level, such as recognition, signalling, copy, transport, ... The protein sequences realizing a given function may largely vary across organisms, giving rise to a protein family. Here, we estimate the entropy of those families based on different approaches, including Hidden Markov ...

The evolution of development involves the development of new proteins. Estimates based on the initial results of the genome projects, and on the data banks of protein sequences and structures, suggest that the large majority of proteins come from no more than one thousand families. Members of a family are descended from a common ancestor. Protein families evolve by gene duplication and mutation...

Profile Hidden Markov Models (PHMMs) are recognized as powerful computational vehicles for homology search of protein sequences. Extant PHMM training approaches either use completely unaligned or aligned sequences. The PHMMs resulting from these two training approaches present contrasting tradeoffs w.r.t. alignment information and the accuracy of the search outcome. This paper describes a PHMM ...

Similarities between different protein structures have led to the identification of protein families based upon some measure of structural similarity. Using these similarities one can classify proteins into structural families and higher-order groupings from which inferred function can be transferred. When taken for a large number of proteins, these schemes point to evolutionary relationships b...

autosomal recessive and sporadic non-syndromic hearing loss (arsnshl) is the major form of hereditary deafness.mutations in the gjb2 gene encoding the gap-junction protein connexin 26 have been identified to be highly associated with arsnshl. in this study we have analyzed 196 deaf subjects from 179 families having one or more deaf children in 3 proviences of iran, including kordestan, khuzesta...

Recent welfare reform legislation requires increased parental work effort and imposes time limits on the receipt of federal assistance. These changes were based in part on assumptions that parental welfare receipt may be negatively related to family processes and children's attitudes and behaviors. Currently, researchers know little about the effects of welfare by itself relative to the effects...

In August 1996, Congress and the president replaced the 60-year-old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with a block grant, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), permitting states to experiment with new forms of assistance to low-income families. States seem likely to try increasingly ambitious reforms as they gain experience under their TANF flexibility, at least if...