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Direct prePRINTS access:

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About prePRINTS:

prePRINTS is an automatically generated supplement to the PRINTS database, aiming to provide increased protein family coverage.
The database is a compendium of protein "fingerprints", which are groups of conserved motifs used to characterise a protein family. The diagnostic power of a fingerprint is refined by iterative scanning of a SWISS-PROT/TrEMBL composite. Usually the motifs do not overlap, but are separated along a sequence, though they may be contiguous in 3D-space. Fingerprints can encode protein folds and functionalities more flexibly and powerfully than can single motifs, full diagnostic potency deriving from the mutual context provided by motif neighbours. (references)
prePRINTS is built from sequence alignments extracted from PRODOM. These alignments are extended and passed to a suite of motif detection methods. The resultant family- specific motif sets are then used to generate fingerprints which may be used for sequence diagnosis.

Each fingerprint is annotated automatically using PRECIS, a prototypic tool which creates protein reports extracted from concise information in SWISS-PROT. The mapping of SWISS-PROT information to PRECIS annotation is summarised here. Since automatically derived annotation tends to be of lower quality than that compiled by a human annotator, database entries are referred to as "preprints".

The database is managed by the object-relational PostgreSQL database management system. The prePRINTS schema is based on that used by PRINTS-S, the relational cousin of PRINTS.

Contact us: or, for more info, visit Bioinformatics at Manchester, Faculty of Life Sciences, School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester.