Does my family of interest have a determined 3D protein structure?

Two related questions that we are often asked via the Pfam helpdesk is ‘Which families have a known three-dimensional structure?’ and ‘Why is a particular a PDB structure not found in Pfam’.  You may think that there are obvious answers to these questions – but as with many things in life the answer is not necessarily as straight forward as you would have thought. In this joint posting between Andreas Prlic (senior scientist at RCSB Protein Data Bank) and myself (Rob Finn, Pfam Production Lead), we will elaborate on the way the PDB and Pfam cross referencing occurs, why discrepancies occurred in the past and describe the pipeline that the RCSB PDB has implemented using the HMMER web services API, which should provide the most current answer to these  questions.

Introducing AntiFam

AntiFam [1] is the newest addition to the Xfam brand. It is a database of hidden Markov models (HMMs) designed to identify spurious open reading frames (ORFs). It is available now on our ftp site:
ftp://ftp.sanger.ac.uk/pub/databases/Pfam/AntiFam/

Proposed Pfam release changes

The current Pfam release, version 26.0, took approximately 4 months to nurse through the various stages of updating the sequence database, resolving overlaps between families, rebuilding the MySQL database and performing all of the post-processing that constitutes the ‘release’.  The production team strives to make two releases a year, but I really do not fancy spend two thirds of a year on Pfam releases.  Thus, with my colleagues, I have been reviewing what we do and why we do it and, probably more importantly, assessing how much different sections of the Web site are used.  Below is a list of changes that are going to happen in the next release, release 27.0.

The Pfam website in a virtual machine

Since releasing the new Pfam website four years ago, we’ve had a steady trickle of mails from users who would like to install and run the site within their own local environment. It used to be possible to do just that, given a following wind, if you were ready to install the site from its source code. Unfortunately, after some internal changes and as the list of Perl module dependencies grew and grew, the process got harder and more complex and eventually we stopped supporting it entirely. We’ve been actively discouraging people from trying this for far too long, all the while promising to make the process easier. Finally we’ve managed to get around to building a virtual machine (VM) that should make the whole thing possible again.

The new NAR paper is out!

Dear Pfam-mers,

As you surely have noted the highly anticipated new Pfam paper is out as part of the 2012 NAR database issue! We were delighted to be listed as a featured article. The paper covers the new release 26.0 (more on this from Rob soon) and presents some novel analysis that may be of interest to Pfam addicts like you. We quite extensively discuss our use of family-specific bit score gathering thresholds (GAs), hoping to bring clarity to an issue that seems to have been a source of confusion in the past (a.k.a. stop sending us tickets asking what GAs are and how to use them! ). Also, we extend and update the analysis of DUF families that was presented in a previous publication hoping to push more people into the de-DUF a DUF game. So, enjoy reading the paper and send us comments and suggestions, your support and advice is as always invaluable to us!!

Posted by Marco