SledgeHMMER: a web server for batch searching the Pfam database.

The SledgeHMMER web server is intended for genome-scale searching of the Pfam database without having to install this database and the HMMER software locally. The server implements a parallelized version of hmmpfam, the program used for searching the Pfam HMM database. Pfam search results have been calculated for the entire Swiss-Prot and TrEmbl database sequences (approximately 1.2 million) on 256 processors of IA64-based teragrid machines. The Pfam database can be searched in local, glocal or merged mode, using either gathering or E-value thresholds. Query sequences are first matched against the pre-calculated entries to retrieve results, and those without matches are processed through a new search process. Results are emailed in a space-delimited tabular format upon completion of the search. While most other Pfam-searching web servers set a limit of one sequence per query, this server processes batch sequences with no limit on the number of input sequences. The web server and downloadable data are accessible from http://SledgeHmmer.sdsc.edu.