Summary

In this part of the tutorial we had a look at Pfam interface and its features:

• Different ways of searching in Pfam: using UniProt accessions or IDs, Pfam accession/ID for a given family or clan, PDB IDs, protein/DNA sequences or by domain architecture.
• We explored the information provided in Pfam entry pages such as family description, domain organisation, taxonomy distribution and structure information and how to interpret this information.
• In Pfam you can also find structure predictions from AlphaFold and/or trRosetta models when available, which allows the visualisation of domain structures and their relative positions that help to understand or predict the function of protein sequences. This is also useful to identify if a protein is a distant homologue member of a superfamily. These structure predictions help us to adjust domain boundaries, build missing domains or split families into domains.

We hope that you find Pfam useful to assist you in your work and give it a try with your own data. We’ll be looking forward to hearing from you if you need any help, you want to give us some feedback or collaborate with us submitting potential new families/domains, as well as adding information to improve our annotations ? .