TreeFam 9 is now available!

We are happy to announce that TreeFam 9 is online and you can find it under http://www.treefam.org.

TreeFam 9 now has 109 species (vs. 79 in TreeFam 8) and is based on data from Ensembl v69, Ensembl Genomes v16, Wormbase and JGI.

This release marks an important step for TreeFam as it is the first release build since TreeFam has been resurrected.
Here is a list of the most important changes in TreeFam 9:

• New website layout (adopting the Pfam/Rfam/Dfam layout)
• Infrastructure move of web servers and databases to the EBI
• Sequence search against the library of TreeFam family profiles
• new tree visualisations in pure javascript using D3, e.g. see the BRCA2 gene tree here.
• Pairwise homology download

We hope you find all the information you are looking for. If you don’t, please let us know so that we can include the information you want. The old website will remain online here.

If you have questions, suggestions or find bugs, don’t hesitate to contact us through our new forum here.

Happy treefamming,

the TreeFam team
(Fabian, Mateus)

Pfam 27.0 is now available!

In a blog post published just over a year ago, I proposed a number of changes to the content of Pfam to improve scalability and usability of the database.  These changes came into effect a few days ago, when we released Pfam 27.0.  This release of Pfam contains a total of 14831 families, with 1182 new families and 22 families killed since release 26.0. 80% of all proteins in UniProt contain a match to at least one Pfam domain, and 58% of all residues in the sequence database fall within a Pfam domain.

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.

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.