Linking to MEROPS

We encourage other webmasters to make links to MEROPS. However, please note that MEROPS is a framed Web site, so links will work well only if they are constructed in the right way. They need to take advantage of a CGI program on the MEROPS Web site as described below.

Adding a page to your Favorites (Microsoft Internet Explorer) or Bookmarks (Netscape) is easy. Each page in the Database contains a JavaScript function to help you do this. Just click the link "Add this page to your Favorites" at the bottom of the page, and follow the prompts.

If you want to construct links to MEROPS from your own Web site, you will need to know that the format of every link should be like:

http://merops.sanger.ac.uk/cgi-bin/merops.cgi?id=VAR1;action=VAR2

The values of VAR1 and VAR2 are the things that you will need to specify in order to retrieve exactly the right page. First decide whether you want to link to MEROPS at the level of a peptidase or inhibitor, a family, a clan, or one of the general pages (such as an index). Select the value for VAR1 from the table below, and then (optionally) select one of the available values for VAR2. (The value of VAR1 is the more important because there are built-in defaults for VAR2 that will often be acceptable.) All the possible (i.e. valid) values are shown in Table 1 below. Some of the values are written with capital letters for clarity, but in fact the values are not case-sensitive.

When working at the peptidase/inhibitor level, please note that there are special kinds of PepCards that contain peptidase that have not yet been assigned to specific identifiers, or peptidase homologues that are known not to be catalytically active. These are stored in files with names that end in "UPW" or "UNW" respectively for a family that has not been divided into subfamilies. Thus, the members of family M1 that have not been assigned to identifiers can be found under M01.UPW, and those that are known not to be peptidases under M01.UNW. For a family that has been divided into subfamilies, there will be files for each subfamily with endings like "UPA", "UNA", "UPB" and UNB", and so on. All inhibitor homologues that have not been assigned to specific codes are stored in files ending in "UNW", "UNA", etc. according to whether the family has been divided into subfamilies.

Table 1

DAS server