Rawlings Neil D, Morton Fraser R, Kok Chai Yin, Kong Jun, Barrett Alan J
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, CB10 1SA, UK.
Nucleic Acids Res. 2008 Jan;36(Database issue):D320-5. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkm954. Epub 2007 Nov 8.
Peptidases (proteolytic enzymes or proteases), their substrates and inhibitors are of great relevance to biology, medicine and biotechnology. The MEROPS database (http://merops.sanger.ac.uk) aims to fulfil the need for an integrated source of information about these. The organizational principle of the database is a hierarchical classification in which homologous sets of peptidases and protein inhibitors are grouped into protein species, which are grouped into families and in turn grouped into clans. Important additions to the database include newly written, concise text annotations for peptidase clans and the small molecule inhibitors that are outside the scope of the standard classification; displays to show peptidase specificity compiled from our collection of known substrate cleavages; tables of peptidase-inhibitor interactions; and dynamically generated alignments of representatives of each protein species at the family level. New ways to compare peptidase and inhibitor complements between any two organisms whose genomes have been completely sequenced, or between different strains or subspecies of the same organism, have been devised.
肽酶（蛋白水解酶或蛋白酶）、其底物和抑制剂与生物学、医学及生物技术密切相关。MEROPS数据库（http://merops.sanger.ac.uk）旨在满足对这些方面综合信息源的需求。该数据库的组织原则是一种层次分类法，其中肽酶和蛋白质抑制剂的同源集被归为蛋白质种类，这些种类又被归为家族，进而归为族。数据库的重要新增内容包括为肽酶族和标准分类范围之外的小分子抑制剂新编写的简明文本注释；根据我们已知的底物切割集合汇编而成的显示肽酶特异性的展示内容；肽酶 - 抑制剂相互作用表；以及在家族水平上动态生成的每个蛋白质种类代表的比对。已经设计出了新方法，用于比较任何两个基因组已完全测序的生物体之间，或同一生物体的不同菌株或亚种之间的肽酶和抑制剂互补情况。
