SMART: recent updates, new developments and status in 2020

TLDR

SMART is a web resource that identifies and annotates protein domains and analyzes their architectures. SMART version 9 now contains more than 1,300 manually curated domain models—including 68 new recombinase family models—and has been synchronized with UniProt, Ensembl, and STRING, while its web interface and analysis components have been upgraded to handle the expanded feature set.

Abstract

SMART (Simple Modular Architecture Research Tool) is a web resource (https://smart.embl.de) for the identification and annotation of protein domains and the analysis of protein domain architectures. SMART version 9 contains manually curated models for more than 1300 protein domains, with a topical set of 68 new models added since our last update article (1). All the new models are for diverse recombinase families and subfamilies and as a set they provide a comprehensive overview of mobile element recombinases namely transposase, integrase, relaxase, resolvase, cas1 casposase and Xer like cellular recombinase. Further updates include the synchronization of the underlying protein databases with UniProt (2), Ensembl (3) and STRING (4), greatly increasing the total number of annotated domains and other protein features available in architecture analysis mode. Furthermore, SMART's vector-based protein display engine has been extended and updated to use the latest web technologies and the domain architecture analysis components have been optimized to handle the increased number of protein features available.