Currently, many databases are annotated manually. However, with the rapid growth of these databases, automated annotation tools have become necessary. An automated annotation system labels raw data with the occurrence of important high-level features as the data is entered into a database.
Proteins have important biological functions and fold into complicated three-dimensional structures.
The study of the relationship between the structures and the functions of proteins is one of the focuses of molecular biology. Based on the automated annotation system, I will develop an online 3D-Motif Server that help biologists characterize and detect sites within proteins. To validate the hypotheses and evaluate the performance of the system, I will test the sensitivity, specificity, and spatial accuracy of the annotation system on a diverse set of sites. Preliminary results for the system applied to calcium binding sites, disulfide bonding cysteines, ATP binding sites, and sodium binding sites show high sensitivity, specificity, and spatial accuracy.