Database system employing protein function hierarchies for viewing biomolecular sequence data

摘要

Disclosed is a relational database system for storing biomolecular sequence information in a manner that allows sequences to be catalogued and searched according to one or more protein function hierarchies. The hierarchies allow searches for sequences based upon a protein's biological function or molecular function. Also disclosed is a mechanism for automatically grouping new sequences into protein function hierarchies. This mechanism uses descriptive information obtained from "external hits" which are matches of stored sequences against gene sequences stored in an external database such as GenBank. The descriptive information provided with the external database is evaluated according to a specific algorithm and used to automatically group the external hits (or the sequences associated with the hits) in the categories. Ultimately, the biomolecular sequences stored in databases of this invention are provided with both descriptive information from the external hit and category information from a relevant hierarchy or hierarchies.