This release includes a lot of new developments to the InterPro website and additional annotations from different resources.

Announcement of the Pfam website decommission

The latest release of InterPro comes with a number of improvements to the website. The list of changes is detailed below.

The latest release of InterPro comes with a number of improvements to the website and API. The list of changes is detailed below.

The latest release of InterPro comes with a number of improvements to the website and API. The list of changes is detailed below.

AlphaFold 2.0 has revolutionised structure prediction enabling the rapid creation of high quality models across many model organisms. We expect these models to drive forward the field of molecular biology and biomedical research.

The latest release of InterPro comes with a number of improvements to the website. The list of changes is detailed below. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please contact us.

The latest release of InterPro comes with a number of improvements to the website. The list of changes is detailed below. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please contact us.

The latest release of InterPro comes with a large number of improvements to the website. We hope that these changes large or small will make it easier for our users to find what they are looking for. We explain each of the changes in detail below.

Gene duplication serves as a major force in evolution. Duplicated genes can become a playground for evolution, and duplicates can split functions of the ancestral protein (subfuntionalization), or gain new functions (neofunctionalization). Sometimes they are mutated beyond rescue and become pseudogenes. Here we would like to demonstrate how InterPro can help researchers to navigate a particular group of duplicated proteins and their taxonomic distribution using their domain architecture. This can help us to understand how the protein evolved and diversified and help us to reach certain taxonomic groups that might be otherwise overlooked.

InterPro 83.0 has been released with plenty of new InterPro entries, but also with many new features and improvements. This blog post describes the new key features you can expect to encounter while navigating the InterPro website.

In the last post we discussed the technical details of our API. We talked about how the website influenced some of the performance requirements of the API. The website, or for that matter any other client, was seen as a black box that created requests that the API needed to respond to. In this article we will switch those roles and delve into technical details of the web client, whilst treating the API as a black box that always responds to the client’s requests.

On September 25th 2019 the traffic manager system at EBI underwent a small change: the URL https://www.ebi.ac.uk/interpro/ now redirects to a different machine. And just like that, the project we had been working on for over 3 years became the official InterPro website.

InterPro 82.0 has been released with plenty of new InterPro entries, but also with many new features and improvements. This blog post describes the new key features you can expect to encounter while navigating the InterPro website.

InterPro entries are comprised of one or more signatures from member databases, thereby providing a unified view of protein families. Each InterPro entry is labelled with a “type” reflecting what the constituent signatures represent: families, domains, repeats or sites. As part of release 65.0, InterPro has added a new entry type, homologous superfamily, to complement the existing set of types. A homologous superfamily is a group of proteins that share a common evolutionary origin, indicated by their structural similarities.

The genus Homo, to which all human beings belong, is believed to have evolved from Australopithecus around 2–3 million years ago. Lucy, the Australopithecus afarensis ape, whose skeleton was pieced together from several hundred pieces of bone fossils, is the best known example of this genus. A gene duplication event that happened around 3.4 million years ago might have provided Lucy and her descendants with a boost to their brainpower.

Those of you with sharp eyes may have noticed some minor changes to the InterPro web site as we have moved to adopt EMBL-EBI’s new site guidelines.

The thing about icebergs is, with 90% of their volume hidden beneath the water, it can be hard to appreciate their true size. The same can be said about InterPro 61.0, which represents a real iceberg of a release, with a huge amount of unseen work below the surface that is not fully reflected in the release note statistics.

We are pleased to announce that the NCBI Conserved Domain Database (CDD) has joined the InterPro consortium as a member database, and has begun to be integrated into the resource.

You have probably been as horrified and saddened as me to see the shocking abnormality that affects newborn babies whose mothers have been infected with the Zika virus.

The removal of annotation from biological databases is often taken to mean that the annotation was wrong in the first place. Why else would diligent biocuators remove information that had been painstakingly added to database entries?

You can still find previous articles published to the InterPro blog. Bear in mind that these are older articles and might be out of date. Find them on Blogspot.

A famous cola company launched a new product contained in a gleaming green can last year. As a regular cola drinker, I was intrigued by the packaging. After doing some research, I discovered that this variety of cola contains a sweetener called Stevia.

You may have heard about toxoplasmosis, or read about it in a newspaper or magazine. Toxoplasmosis is a condition caused by the protozoan Toxoplasma gondii, an intracellular parasite that infects a wide variety of warm-blooded animals, including humans. T. gondii has attracted the attention of both the scientific and lay communities, and with good reason. It is one of the most successful parasites, infecting over one third of the human population, with rates varying depending upon geographical location [1].

Do you have friends that cannot handle alcoholic drinks? Just half a pint of beer or a few sips of wine, and their faces turn red, possibly with some hangover symptoms, such as headaches and nausea? You may envy their cheap night out, but wonder why these people cannot tolerate alcohol as you do. The phenomenon is called ‘alcohol flush reaction’, also known as ‘Asian flush syndrome’, due to its association with the Asian population. It is a condition caused by the accumulation of acetaldehyde, a metabolic byproduct of the catabolic metabolism of alcohol.

You can still find previous articles published to the InterPro blog in the “protein focus” category. They are archived and available in PDF format from this article.