The Evolutionary Classification of Protein Domains (ECOD) 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 genom ...

that classifies

protein domains 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 se ...

available from the

Protein Data Bank The Protein Data Bank (PDB) is a database for the three-dimensional structural data of large biological molecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids. The data, typically obtained by X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, or, increasingly, c ...

. The ECOD tries to determine the evolutionary relationships between proteins. Similar to

Pfam Pfam is a database of protein families that includes their annotations and multiple sequence alignments generated using hidden Markov models. The most recent version, Pfam 35.0, was released in November 2021 and contains 19,632 families. Use ...

CATH The CATH Protein Structure Classification database is a free, publicly available online resource that provides information on the evolutionary relationships of protein domains. It was created in the mid-1990s by Professor Christine Orengo and col ...

, and

SCOP A ( or ) was a poet as represented in Old English literature#Poetry, Old English poetry. The scop is the Old English counterpart of the Old Norse ', with the important difference that "skald" was applied to historical persons, and scop is used ...

, ECOD compiles domains instead of whole proteins. However, ECOD focuses on evolutionary relationships more heavily: instead of grouping proteins by

folds Benjamin Scott Folds (born September 12, 1966) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and composer, who is the first artistic advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Kennedy Center in ...

, which may simply represent

convergent evolution Convergent evolution is the independent evolution of similar features in species of different periods or epochs in time. Convergent evolution creates analogous structures that have similar form or function but were not present in the last com ...

, ECOD groups proteins by demonstratable homology only.

References

Protein structure Protein classification Biological databases Protein superfamilies {{Biodatabase-stub