About PRINTS

PRINTS is a compendium of protein fingerprints. A fingerprint is a group of conserved motifs used to characterise a protein family; its diagnostic power is refined by iterative scanning of a SwissProt/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. PRINTS was previously hosted at the University of Manchester Bioinformatics Education and Research, but has been retired and InterPro serves as an archive for this resource.

For more information about PRINTS, please refer to its latest publication:

Attwood TK, Coletta A, Muirhead G, Pavlopoulou A, Philippou PB, Popov I, Romá-Mateo C, Theodosiou A, Mitchell AL. The PRINTS database: a fine-grained protein sequence annotation and analysis resource–its status in 2012. Database (Oxford). 2012;2012 bas019. doi:10.1093/database/bas019. PMID: 22508994.