20 years of the SMART protein domain annotation resource

Abstract

SMART (Simple Modular Architecture Research Tool) is a web resource (http://smart.embl.de) for the identification and annotation of protein domains and the analysis of protein domain architectures. SMART version 8 contains manually curated models for more than 1300 protein domains, with approximately 100 new models added since our last update article (1). The underlying protein databases were synchronized with UniProt (2), Ensembl (3) and STRING (4), doubling the total number of annotated domains and other protein features to more than 200 million. In its 20th year, the SMART analysis results pages have been streamlined again and its information sources have been updated. SMART's vector based display engine has been extended to all protein schematics in SMART and rewritten to use the latest web technologies. The internal full text search engine has been redesigned and updated, resulting in greatly increased search speed.

Figure 1.

Example SMART protein annotation and tree export. (A) SMART annotation page for protein CS1_HUMAN. Protein schematic representations are displayed using vector graphics in a Canvas based applet. Schematics are zoomable without quality loss and exportable into high resolution SVG or bitmap images. Protein features selected in various data tables are dynamically highlighted directly in the viewer. Using the interactive scale, any protein region can be selected and submitted for further BLAST analysis. (B) An example domain architecture analysis result, exported from SMART directly into the interactive Tree Of Life (iTOL) version 3 (21).