Using ProScan to Identify Protein Signatures

The ProScan Internet tool is used to find biologically relevant sites, patterns and profiles in a protein sequence. ProScan scans your sequence against the PROSITE, which is a database of protein families and domains. Expression simplifies your ProScan analysis, by producing a compact and easy-to-read results.

Launching ProScan

Performing a ProScan analysis is simple. After loading in your protein sequence, select ProScan from the Internet menu. You can set the stringency of the search either by setting the number of mistmatches allowed or the percentage similarity. When you push the Submit button, your sequence and the parameters will be processed over the internet, and your results returned. The time it takes for your results to be returned is dependent on the traffic at the processing server, as well as the speed of your internet connection. Typically your query should be processed in under 15 seconds.

Results Format

The results are presented in an easy-to-read list. An outline of a pattern match is shown below:

The randomised probability is the probability of the pattern occurring in your sequence by chance. Identical matches are shown in red, while similar matches are in green. Clicking on the name of the pattern will link you to the corresponding record in the PROSITE database at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. This provides a description, references and other related information concerning the identified pattern.

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