PROSITE is a
protein database.
It consists of entries describing the
protein families
A protein family is a group of evolutionarily related proteins. In many cases, a protein family has a corresponding gene family, in which each gene encodes a corresponding protein with a 1:1 relationship. The term "protein family" should not be ...
,
domains and
functional sites as well as
amino acid
Amino acids are organic compounds that contain both amino and carboxylic acid functional groups. Although hundreds of amino acids exist in nature, by far the most important are the alpha-amino acids, which comprise proteins. Only 22 alpha am ...
patterns and profiles in them. These are manually curated by a team of the
Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic not-for-profit foundation which federates bioinformatics activities throughout Switzerland.
The institute was established on 30 March 1998 and its mission is to provide core bioinfor ...
and tightly integrated into
Swiss-Prot
UniProt is a freely accessible database of protein sequence and functional information, many entries being derived from genome sequencing projects. It contains a large amount of information about the biological function of proteins derived from ...
protein annotation. PROSITE was created in 1988 by
Amos Bairoch
Amos Bairoch (born 22 November 1957) is a Swiss bioinformatician and Professor of Bioinformatics at the Department of Human Protein Sciences of the University of Geneva where he leads the CALIPHO group at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics ( ...
, who directed the group for more than 20 years. Since July 2018, the director of PROSITE and Swiss-Prot is Alan Bridge.
PROSITE's uses include identifying possible functions of newly discovered proteins and analysis of known proteins for previously undetermined activity. Properties from well-studied
gene
In biology, the word gene (from , ; "...Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word gene to describe the Mendelian units of heredity..." meaning ''generation'' or ''birth'' or ''gender'') can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a ba ...
s can be propagated to biologically related organisms, and for different or poorly known genes biochemical functions can be predicted from similarities. PROSITE offers tools for protein
sequence analysis
In bioinformatics, sequence analysis is the process of subjecting a DNA, RNA or peptide sequence to any of a wide range of analytical methods to understand its features, function, structure, or evolution. Methodologies used include sequence alig ...
and motif detection (see
sequence motif
In biology, a sequence motif is a nucleotide or amino-acid sequence pattern that is widespread and usually assumed to be related to biological function of the macromolecule. For example, an ''N''-glycosylation site motif can be defined as ''As ...
,
PROSITE patterns). It is part of the
ExPASy proteomics
Proteomics is the large-scale study of proteins. Proteins are vital parts of living organisms, with many functions such as the formation of structural fibers of muscle tissue, enzymatic digestion of food, or synthesis and replication of DNA. In ...
analysis servers.
The database ProRule builds on the domain descriptions of PROSITE.
It provides additional information about functionally or structurally critical amino acids. The rules contain information about biologically meaningful residues, like active sites,
substrate- or
co-factor-binding sites,
posttranslational modification sites or
disulfide
In biochemistry, a disulfide (or disulphide in British English) refers to a functional group with the structure . The linkage is also called an SS-bond or sometimes a disulfide bridge and is usually derived by the coupling of two thiol groups. In ...
bonds, to help function determination. These can automatically generate annotation based on PROSITE motifs.
Statistics
, release 2022_01 has 1,902 documentation entries, 1,311 patterns, 1,336 profiles, and 1,352 ProRules.
See also
*
Uniprot
UniProt is a freely accessible database of protein sequence and functional information, many entries being derived from genome sequencing projects. It contains a large amount of information about the biological function of proteins derived from ...
the universal
protein database, a central resource on protein information - PROSITE adds data to it.
*
InterPro
InterPro is a database of protein families, protein domains and functional sites in which identifiable features found in known proteins can be applied to new protein sequences in order to functionally characterise them.
The contents of InterPro ...
a centralized database, grouping data from databases of protein families, domains and functional sites - part of the data come from PROSITE.
*
Protein subcellular localization prediction
Protein subcellular localization prediction (or just protein localization prediction) involves the prediction of where a protein resides in a cell (biology), cell, its subcellular localization.
In general, prediction tools take as input informatio ...
another example of use of PROSITE.
References
External links
*{{Official website, http://prosite.expasy.org/
ProRule— database of rules based on PROSITE predictors
Biological databases
Proteomics