Simple Modular Architecture Research Tool (SMART) is a

biological database Biological databases are libraries of biological sciences, collected from scientific experiments, published literature, high-throughput experiment technology, and computational analysis. They contain information from research areas including geno ...

that is used in the identification and analysis of

protein domain In molecular biology, a protein domain is a region of a protein's polypeptide chain that is self-stabilizing and that folds independently from the rest. Each domain forms a compact folded three-dimensional structure. Many proteins consist of s ...

s within protein sequences. SMART uses profile-hidden Markov models built from

multiple sequence alignment Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) may refer to the process or the result of sequence alignment of three or more biological sequences, generally protein, DNA, or RNA. In many cases, the input set of query sequences are assumed to have an evolutio ...

s to detect protein domains in protein sequences. The most recent release of SMART contains 1,204 domain models. Data from SMART was used in creating the

Conserved Domain Database The Conserved Domain Database (CDD) is a database of well-annotated multiple sequence alignment models and derived database search models, for ancient domains and full-length proteins. Philosophy Domains can be thought of as distinct functional ...

collection and is also distributed as part of the

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 ...

database. The database is hosted by the

European Molecular Biology Laboratory The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) is an intergovernmental organization dedicated to molecular biology research and is supported by 27 member states, two prospect states, and one associate member state. EMBL was created in 1974 and ...

in Heidelberg.

References

External links

SMART web site
Protein structure Protein classification Biological databases {{bioinformatics-stub