Olfaction is an important mechanism by which humans and animals communicate with environment. Odorant-binding proteins
(OBPs) play crucial role in the olfactory mechanism. Here, we briefly discuss about the role of OBPs and their importance in industrial,
pest management and therapeutic developments.
Multiple sequence alignments become biologically meaningful only if conserved and functionally important residues and
secondary structural elements preserved can be identified at equivalent positions. This is particularly important for transmembrane
proteins like G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) with seven transmembrane helices. TM-MOTIF is a software package and an
effective alignment viewer to identify and display conserved motifs and amino acid substitutions (AAS) at each position of the
aligned set of homologous sequences of GPCRs. The key feature of the package is to display the predicted membrane topology for
seven transmembrane helices in seven colours (VIBGYOR colouring scheme) and to map the identified motifs on its respective
helices /loop regions. It is an interactive package which provides options to the user to submit query or pre-aligned set of GPCR
sequences to align with a reference sequence, like rhodopsin, whose structure has been solved experimentally. It also provides the
possibility to identify the nearest homologue from the available inbuilt GPCR or Olfactory Receptor cluster dataset whose
association is already known for its receptor type.AvailabilityThe database is available for free at mini@ncbs.res.in
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