GOmotif: A web server for investigating the biological role of protein sequence motifs

Abstract

Background: Many proteins contain conserved sequence patterns (motifs) that contribute to their functionality. The process of experimentally identifying and validating novel protein motifs can be difficult, expensive, and time consuming. A means for helping to identify in advance the possible function of a novel motif is important to test hypotheses concerning the biological relevance of these motifs, thus reducing experimental trial-and-error.Results: GOmotif accepts PROSITE and regular expression formatted motifs as input and searches a Gene Ontology annotated protein database using motif search tools. The search returns the set of proteins containing matching motifs and their associated Gene Ontology terms. These results are presented as: 1) a hierarchical, navigable tree separated into the three Gene Ontology biological domains - biological process, cellular component, and molecular function; 2) corresponding pie charts indicating raw and statistically adjusted distributions of the results, and 3) an interactive graphical network view depicting the location of the results in the Gene Ontology.Conclusions: GOmotif is a web-based tool designed to assist researchers in investigating the biological role of novel protein motifs. GOmotif can be freely accessed at http://www.gomotif.ca. © 2011 Bristow et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.