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Pfam Clans
What is a Pfam clan?
Related Pfam entries are grouped together into clans. The relationship between entries in a clan may be defined by:
- sequence similarity (whilst still originating from a common ancestor)
- similarity of known three-dimensional structures
- functional similarity
- similarity between their profile HMMs, as determined by algorithms such as HHsearch
How can I find Pfam clans?
If a Pfam entry is included in a clan this information will be displayed in the Overview tab, next to Clan, below the Pfam short name, with a link to the corresponding clan page, as you can see in the example Pfam entry in Figure 4.
Additionally, you can browse through the Pfam clans by selecting Browse + By Clan/Set in the InterPro website menu and then selecting Pfam, as shown in Figure 5. Clicking the accession identifier or the name of the clan will open the clan page.
You can also query the Pfam Clan page by typing the clan accession or keywords that form part of the name of the clan in the Search entry sets box located in the results table header.
In a clan page, you can see the Pfam entries belonging to it, all the proteins included in the clan with the known structures (from PDBe), its taxonomic distribution and the linked proteomes. If a Wikipedia article is linked to the clan it will be displayed below.
Browse the InterPro website to answer the following questions.