PROCARB: A Database of Known and Modelled Carbohydrate-Binding Protein Structures with Sequence-Based Prediction Tools

Understanding of the three-dimensional structures of proteins that interact with carbohydrates covalently (glycoproteins) as well as noncovalently (protein-carbohydrate complexes) is essential to many biological processes and plays a significant role in normal and disease-associated functions. It is important to have a central repository of knowledge available about these protein-carbohydrate complexes as well as preprocessed data of predicted structures. This can be significantly enhanced by tools de novo which can predict carbohydrate-binding sites for proteins in the absence of structure of experimentally known binding site. PROCARB is an open-access database comprising three independently working components, namely, (i) Core PROCARB module, consisting of three-dimensional structures of protein-carbohydrate complexes taken from Protein Data Bank (PDB), (ii) Homology Models module, consisting of manually developed three-dimensional models of N-linked and O-linked glycoproteins of unknown three-dimensional structure, and (iii) CBS-Pred prediction module, consisting of web servers to predict carbohydrate-binding sites using single sequence or server-generated PSSM. Several precomputed structural and functional properties of complexes are also included in the database for quick analysis. In particular, information about function, secondary structure, solvent accessibility, hydrogen bonds and literature reference, and so forth, is included. In addition, each protein in the database is mapped to Uniprot, Pfam, PDB, and so forth.