PLecDom

PLecDom detects plant lectin domains within polypeptide and EST sequences and classifies them into established lectin families for evolutionary and functional analysis.

Key Features:

• Detection and Classification: Accepts sequences in FASTA format to identify lectin domains and classify them into known families based on substrate specificity using family models.
• Divergence Estimation: Estimates the extent of divergence between newly identified domains and existing homologs to inform evolutionary relationships.
• Domain Boundary Extraction: Extracts domain boundaries and provides flanking sequence regions for downstream analyses.
• Scalability and Efficiency: Processes large-scale protein and EST datasets efficiently for genome-scale scanning.

Scientific Applications:

• Genome-scale lectin annotation: Applied to protein and EST data from 48 plant genome-sequencing projects to enrich annotations of plant lectins.
• Identification of biochemical targets: Identified potential lectin candidates for biochemical characterization.
• Evolutionary analysis: Supports comparative and evolutionary analysis of lectin domain families.

Methodology:

Searches are performed with profile Hidden Markov Models derived from alignments of known lectin domain sequences representing multiple plant lectin domain families.