{A . Protein families and domains.}

{1. InterPro as a source of protein domain and family information.}

{2. Look up protein domain information in ProDom.}

{3. Look up protein fingerprint information in PRINTS.}

{4. Look up protein family information using the Pfam database.}

{5. Find out about your protein family/superfamily via the PIR/MIPS FamBase.}

{6. Find out about your protein family/superfamily via the Stanford eMotif site.}

{B. PROSITE signature database.}

{1. Learn about PROSITE and how signatures are made by reading the user manual.}

{2. Check to see if your sequences contain known PROSITE signatures.}

{3. Use the GCG program MOTIFS to search your sequence for motifs.}

{C. Weight matrix patterns }

{1. Weight your sequences using the WEIGHT program.}

{2. Create a profile from a group of aligned sequences. }

{3. Search against database using PROFILESEARCH }

{4. Compare results to BLAST search with some of the single sequences. }

{5. Use MEME server to learn motifs. }

{D. Questions.}

1. Briefly explain what is mean by a signature. If you check your sequence for all PROSITE signatures and find no matches, can you be confident that your sequence is unrelated to known structural and functional motifs? Explain. [15 pts]
2. How are sequences clustered into families? What is the difference between a family and a superfamily? [5 pts]
3. How does a profile differ from a simple frequency matrix.
4. What is the purpose of weighting sequences when determining motifs and patterns? [5 pts]
5. Explain why a profile or motif based search is likely to give more complete results than a single-sequence search.[5 pts]
6. MEME motifs do not contain gaps. Why is this not a severe problem in using MEME to describe the conserved motifs in a family of sequences? [5 pts]
7. What is InterPro and, in one or two sentences, what is its function and objectives? [5 pts]
8. What does the "Graphical" link under "Matches" in your InterPro entry do? [5 pts]
9. What are the differences and similarities between Pfam, PRINTS, PROSITE, and ProDom? [10 pts]
10. How do the alignments at ProDom compare with your alignments in Exercise 7? [5 pts]
11. How do the family trees at ProDom compare with those you obtained in Exercise 7? [5 pts]
12. Some SwissProt entries have more than one PRINTS entry. Why is this? [5 pts]
13. How do the alignments at PRINTS compare with your alignments in Exercise 7? [5 pts]
14. How do the family trees at PRINTS compare with those you obtained in Exercise 7? [5 pts]
15. How do the alignments at Pfam compare with your alignments in Exercise 7? [5 pts]
16. How do the family trees at Pfam compare with those you obtained in Exercise 7? [5 pts]
17. Comments on the use of Jalview? What is Jalview? [5 pts]
18. How do the alignments at FamBase in PIR compare with your alignments above? [5 pts]
19. What is the output of eMotif? [5 pts]
20. What does the "eMotif Maker" application do? [5 pts]