PRECIS: Protein reports engineered from concise information in SWISS-PROT

Abstract

Motivation: There have been several endeavours to address the problem of annotating sequence data computationally, but the task is non-trivial and few tools have emerged that gather useful information on a given sequence, or set of sequences, in a simple and convenient manner. As more genome projects bear fruit, the mass of uncharacterized sequence data accumulating in public repositories grows ever larger. There is thus a pressing need for tools to support the process of automatic analysis and annotation of newly determined sequences. With this in mind, we have developed PRECIS, which automatically creates protein reports from sets of SWISS-PROT entries, collating results into structured reports, detailing known biological and medical information, literature and database cross-references, and relevant keywords. Availability: The software is accessible online at: http://www.bioinf.man.ac.uk/cgi-bin/dbbrowser/precis/blast_precis.cgi