WSsas: a web service for the annotation of functional residues through structural homologues.

MOTIVATION: Annotation tools help scientists to traverse the gap between characterized and uncharacterized proteins. Tools for the prediction of protein function include those which predict the function of entire proteins or complexes, those annotating functional domains and those which predict specific residues within the domain. We have developed WSsas, a web service focused on the annotation of essential functional residues. WSsas uses similarity searches and pairwise alignments to transfer functional information about binding, catalytic and protein-protein interaction residues from solved structures to query sequences. In addition, WSsas can supply information about the relevant functional atoms. The web service definition (WSDL) file and a Perl client are freely available at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/thornton-srv/databases/WSsas/.