It has been a little quiet on the Pfam blog recently, but behind the scenes we’ve been working hard on the migration to HMMER3.
We have built HMMER3 models for all of the Pfam alignments, and searched them against the sequence database. This part was super quick, as HMMER3 is ~100 times faster than HMMER2. Due to the increased sensitivity of HMMER3, many of our Pfam families have grown in size, and we have found that ~80,000 sequences in the sequence database now have overlapping matches to more than one Pfam family.
Within Pfam we have a rule that states that our families should not overlap; this means that any one amino acid can belong to only a single Pfam family. The exception to this rule applies to families within a clan – clans are Pfam’s collections of related families – where overlaps between clan members are allowed. Over the last few weeks we’ve been working through and resolving the list of 80,000 overlaps. Read the rest of this entry »
