SMART 6: recent updates and new developments

TLDR

SMART is an online tool for identifying and annotating protein domains, offering a user‑friendly platform to explore and compare domain architectures in proteins and genes. Recent updates expanded data integration, added metabolic pathway annotations and links, and introduced DAS and SOAP web‑service access to enhance user friendliness. The current release includes 784 curated domain models, an expanded database covering 630 species, and a redesigned interaction network view for over 2 million proteins.

Abstract

Simple modular architecture research tool (SMART) is an online tool (http://smart.embl.de/) for the identification and annotation of protein domains. It provides a user-friendly platform for the exploration and comparative study of domain architectures in both proteins and genes. The current release of SMART contains manually curated models for 784 protein domains. Recent developments were focused on further data integration and improving user friendliness. The underlying protein database based on completely sequenced genomes was greatly expanded and now includes 630 species, compared to 191 in the previous release. As an initial step towards integrating information on biological pathways into SMART, our domain annotations were extended with data on metabolic pathways and links to several pathways resources. The interaction network view was completely redesigned and is now available for more than 2 million proteins. In addition to the standard web access to the database, users can now query SMART using distributed annotation system (DAS) or through a simple object access protocol (SOAP) based web service.