We are pleased to announce the release of Pfam 33.1! Some of you may have noticed that we never released Pfam 33.0 – we had initially planned to do so in March 2020, but due to the global pandemic, we redirected our efforts to updating the Pfam SARS-CoV-2 models instead (see previous blog posts Pfam SARS-CoV-2 special update and Pfam SARS-CoV-2 special update (part 2)). We have added these updated models to the Pfam 33.0 release, along with a few other families that we had built since the data for Pfam 33.0 were frozen, to create Pfam 33.1.
Pfam 33.1 contains a total of 18259 families and 635 clans. Since the last release, we have built 355 new families and killed 25 families. We regularly receive feedback from users about families or domains that are missing in Pfam, and typically add many user submitted families at each release. We include the submitters name and ORCID identifier as an author of such Pfam entries. This helps people to get credit for community activities that improve molecular biology databases such as Pfam.
One such user submission was from Heli Mönttinen (University of Helsinki) who submitted a large scale clustering of virus families. Based on this clustering we added 88 new families to Pfam.
We have also added 8 new clans since the last Pfam release. One of the new clans is the TSP1 superfamily (CL0692). Previously a single family (PF00090) attempted to identify all known TSP1 domains. Based on structural work by Marko Hyvönen (University of Cambridge) and colleagues we have added an additional three families (PF19028, PF19030 and PF19035) to Pfam. These new families have both improved the coverage of the TSP1 domain, and better modelled the variations in disulphide binding across the structure space.
Figure 1. Organisation of the TSP1 clan in Pfam shown as a sequence similarity network. Image taken from Xu et al.
Finally, we are very happy to welcome Sara and Lowri who are working as curators for both the Pfam and InterPro resources and are already making great contributions to the resources.
Posted by Jaina and Alex
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