Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access originally published online on October 11, 2007
Nucleic Acids Research 2008 36(Database issue):D63-D68; doi:10.1093/nar/gkm793
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Nucleic Acids Research, 2008, Vol. 36, Database issue D63-D68
© 2007 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article appears in the following Nucleic Acids Research issue: Database issue [View the issue table of contents]
Articles |
ProSAS: a database for analyzing alternative splicing in the context of protein structures
Practical Informatics and Bioinformatics Group, Department of Informatics, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Amalienstrasse 17, D-80333 Munich, Germany
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +49 (0) 89 21804064; Fax: +49 (0) 89 21804054; Email: fabian.birzele{at}bio.ifi.lmu.de and birzele{at}bio.ifi.lmu.de
Received August 13, 2007. Revised September 11, 2007. Accepted September 17, 2007.
Alternative splicing is known to be one of the major sources for functional diversity in higher eukaryotes. Several splicing isoforms have been characterized in the literature that play important roles in cellular processes like apoptosis or signal transduction pathways. Splicing events can often be detected on the mRNA level by large-scale cDNA or EST experiments and such data is collected and annotated in several databases. Nevertheless, the effects of splicing on the structure of a protein are largely unknown. The ProSAS (Protein Structure and Alternative Splicing) database fills this gap and provides a unified resource for analyzing effects of alternative splicing events in the context of protein structures. ProSAS comprehensively annotates and models protein structures for several Ensembl genomes as well as SwissProt entries harbouring splicing events. Alternative isoforms annotated in Ensembl or SwissProt can be analyzed on the protein structure and protein function level using an intuitive user interface that provides several features and tools for a structure-based analysis of alternative splicing events. The ProSAS database is freely accessible at http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/ProSAS.