ASTRAL: Foundation for structure and evolution studies

描述（由申请人提供）：ASTRAL纲要是用于帮助研究蛋白质结构和进化的软件和数据库的集合。它是SCOP的补充：蛋白质结构分类数据库，由我们在英国剑桥MRC的同事创建。SCOP是根据结构和进化关系对所有已知结构的蛋白质进行结构域的综合排序。ASTRAL有三个主要目的：提供SCOP中域的权威序列和坐标集，检测和消除SCOP分类中的错误，并提供额外的软件和数据库来帮助分析SCOP中的数据。这些额外的数据包括定量分数，为SCOP中每个晶体学确定的PDB条目分配质量度量，PDB链和SCOP域的代表性子集，以及ASTEROIDS，这是一个从SCOP框架内新解决的PDB条目中对域进行初步分类的系统。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The ASTRAL compendium is a collection of software and databases used to aid research into protein structure and evolution. It is complementary to the SCOP: Structural Classification of Proteins database, created by our colleagues at the MRC in Cambridge, UK. SCOP is a comprehensive ordering of domains from all proteins of known structure according to their structural and evolutionary relationships. ASTRAL serves three major purposes: to provide the authoritative sequences and coordinate sets for domains in SCOP, to detect and eliminate errors in the SCOP classification, and to provide additional software and databases to aid in the analysis of the data in SCOP. These additional data include quantitative scores that assign a measure of quality to each crystallographically determined PDB entry in SCOP, representative subsets of PDB chains and SCOP domains, and ASTEROIDS, a system for preliminary classification of domains from newly solved PDB entries within the SCOP framework. ASTRAL development to date has been driven by the needs of our users, who are primarily structural biologists who require SCOP data in easily accessible formats, but lack the resources or expertise to accurately generate the data themselves. Another major group of users are bioinformaticists who use the ASTRAL subsets as a standard representative cross-section of protein structures on which to develop or compare algorithms. A third important group of users are developers of other databases, such as SUPERFAMILY and PRODOM, which are derived from the data in ASTRAL. Our specific aims in this project are to: 1. Produce, develop, and maintain ASTRAL to ensure its long-term utility, in particular: a) Further automate the software used to build ASTRAL. b) Fully document all tools used to build ASTRAL, and make them available as open source. c) Continue to produce new releases of ASTRAL. 2. Extend ASTRAL'S utility to more of the biomedical research community. 3. Develop resources to facilitate extension of ASTRAL by the bioinformatics community.