The PRINTS database, now in its 21st year, houses a collection of diagnostic protein family ‘fingerprints’. Fingerprints are groups of conserved motifs, evident in multiple sequence alignments, whose unique inter-relationships provide distinctive signatures for particular protein families and structural/functional domains. As such, they may be used to assign uncharacterized sequences to known families, and hence to infer tentative functional, structural and/or evolutionary relationships. The February 2012 release (version 42.0) includes 2156 fingerprints, encoding 12 444 individual motifs, covering a range of globular and membrane proteins, modular polypeptides and so on. Here, we report the current status of the database, and introduce a number of recent developments that help both to render a variety of our annotation and analysis tools easier to use and to make them more widely available.#R##N##R##N#Database URL: www.bioinf.manchester.ac.uk/dbbrowser/PRINTS/
['Teresa K. Attwood', 'Alain Coletta', 'Gareth Muirhead', 'Athanasia Pavlopoulou', 'Peter B. Philippou', 'Ivan Popov', 'Carlos Romá-Mateo', 'Athina Theodosiou', 'Alex L. Mitchell']
The PRINTS database: a fine-grained protein sequence annotation and analysis resource—its status in 2012