SIMAP Science status:

The Project URL has changed. Please reattach your BOINC client to http://boincsimap.org/boincsimap. (See project news...)

What is SIMAP?

Today, protein sequence comparison is one of the most powerful tools in computational biology. It allows characterizing protein sequences based on the information that is preserved in evolution. Many computational methods in biology and medicine are based on protein sequence analysis, e.g. to predict the function and structure of genes and proteins. SIMAP facilitates these methods by providing pre-calculated protein similarities and protein domains. Read more...

What do you do in BOINCSIMAP?

SIMAP contains about all currently published protein sequences and is continuously updated. In BOINCSIMAP, we calculate every month the similarities and domains of newly imported proteins, in order to keep the SIMAP database up-to-date. Protein similarities are computed using the FASTA algorithm which provides optimal speed and higher sensitivity compared to the popular BLAST. Protein domains are calculated using the InterPro methods and databases. Read more...

Why do it?

The SIMAP database is a huge bioinformatic resource, that is used by scientists for very different purposes. Individual researchers use the SIMAP database via the public Web portal, e.g. to investigate the evolution and function of individual proteins. Furthermore, many bioinformatics projects access SIMAP directly via the public Webservice or large-scale download facilities. Your support for BOINCSIMAP keeps the SIMAP database running.

How do it?

BOINC lets you contribute unused computing power on your home PC to projects doing research in many scientific areas. You can contribute to a single project (like BOINCSIMAP), or to any combination of them. It's easy to participate in a BOINC project: download and install BOINC. You will be asked to select a project and enter your email address and a password. That's it! Read more...

What's new?

SIMAP facilitates eggNOG. Genome comparisons are a very powerful and versatile tool in modern molecular biology, as thousands of genomes have been sequenced during the last years. If protein sequences serve as items in comparative genomes, they are typically organized into orthologous groups of evolutionary directly related proteins. Calculations of such groups are very demanding and rely on large-scale sequence similarity data. One of the largest and most prominent databases of orthologous groups is eggNOG. The latest version 3.0 of eggNOG is based on protein similarity data from SIMAP. Our data has replaced time-consuming BLAST searches and provides an increased sensitivity compared to BLAST. We will be happy to continue the fruitful collaboration between eggNOG and SIMAP – which is a typical example how SIMAP facilitates modern biological research. A paper describing eggNOG 3.0 has been published in the 2012 Database Issue of the journal Nucleic Acids Research (Fulltext).

News:

27 Jan 2012 | 14:54:45 UTC
Workunits for February upcoming

3 Jan 2012 | 15:54:03 UTC
Workunits for January upcoming

24 Dec 2011 | 14:05:57 UTC
Best wishes for 2012

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