Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri, USA.
This unit provides an overview of issues involved in domain recognition in protein and DNA sequences. It opens with a discussion of the two primary methods of domain representation, namely consensus sequences and alignment matrices (e.g., the log-odds matrix). The unit continues with a brief overview of some of the resources available for identifying functional domains in nucleotide sequences (e.g., TRANSFAC). In addition, it reviews databases such as Pfam, InterPro and Blocks, which are available for protein analysis.