Copyright © 2003 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

In the growing field of proteomics, tools for the in silico analysis of proteins and even of whole proteomes are of crucial importance to make best use of the accumulating amount of data. To utilise this data for healthcare and drug development, first the characteristics of proteomes of entire species—mainly the human—have to be understood, before secondly differentiation between individuals can be surveyed. Specialised databases about nucleic acid sequences, protein sequences, protein tertiary structure, genome analysis, and proteome analysis represent useful resources for analysis, characterisation, and classification of protein sequences. Different from most proteomics tools focusing on similarity searches, structure analysis and prediction, detection of specific regions, alignments, data mining, 2D PAGE analysis, or protein modelling, respectively, comprehensive databases like the proteome analysis database benefit from the information stored in different databases and make use of different protein analysis tools to provide computational analysis of whole proteomes.