Recent improvements of the ProDom database of protein domain families.

The ProDom database contains protein domain families generated from the SWISS-PROT database by automated sequence comparisons. The current version was built with a new improved procedure based on recursive PSI-BLAST homology searches. ProDom can be searched on the World Wide Web to study domain arrangements within either known families or new proteins, with the help of a user-friendly graphical interface (http://www.toulouse.inra.fr/prodom.html). Recent improvements to the ProDom server include: ProDom queries under the SRS Sequence Retrieval System; links to the PredictProtein server; phylogenetic trees and condensed multiple alignments for a better representation of large domain families, with zooming in and out capabilities. In addition, a similar server was set up to display the outcome of whole genome domain analysis as applied to 17 completed microbial genomes (http://www.toulouse.inra.fr/prodomCG.html ).