ASTRAL: Foundation for structure and evolution studies

描述(由申请人提供)：Astral Briendium是一个软件和数据库的集合，用于帮助研究蛋白质结构和进化。它是对SCOP：蛋白质结构分类数据库的补充，该数据库是由我们在英国剑桥MRC的同事创建的。SCOP是所有已知结构的蛋白质根据它们的结构和进化关系对结构域进行综合排序。Astral有三个主要用途：为SCOP中的域提供权威的序列和坐标集，检测并消除SCOP分类中的错误，以及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为SCOP中每个结晶学确定的PDB条目、PDB链和SCOP结构域的代表性子集以及小行星分配质量度量的量化分数，小行星是SCOP框架内根据新解决的PDB条目对结构域进行初步分类的系统。 到目前为止，星体的发展一直是由我们的用户的需求驱动的，他们主要是结构生物学家，他们需要易于访问的格式的SCOP数据，但缺乏资源或专业知识来准确地生成数据本身。另一个主要的用户群体是生物信息学家，他们使用星体子集作为蛋白质结构的标准代表性横截面，以此来开发或比较算法。第三个重要的用户群体是其他数据库的开发者，如SuperFamily和PRODOM，它们是从Astral的数据中派生出来的。 我们在这个项目中的具体目标是： 1.生产、开发和维护Astral，以确保其长期使用，特别是： A)进一步自动化用于建造Astral的软件。 B)完整地记录用于构建Astral的所有工具，并将其作为开放源码提供。 C)继续制作《Astral》的新版本。 2.将Astral的用途扩展到更多的生物医学研究社区。 3.开发资源，促进生物信息学社区推广Astral。

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.