Current Status of ProNIT: Thermodynamic Database for Protein-Nucleic Acid Interactions

Understanding the mechanism by which protein interacts with nucleic acid is of great importance since these interactions occur in many vital cellular processes including replication, recombination, repair, transcription and translation. Whether proteins bind to nucleic acids or not is determined by the law of thermodynamics. In this regard, thermodynamic factors which control the binding are of fundamental importance. Although databases for the sequence and structure of proteins, nucleic acids and the complexes are developed and available, databases for thermodynamic data on the interaction of protein-nucleic acid are few. Thus, we have developed electronically freely accessible thermodynamic database for protein-nucleic acid interactions, ProNIT [2, 3]. ProNIT aims to provide researchers information about the experimentally determined thermodynamic parameters involved in protein-nucleic acid interactions, published in the literature. It contains several important thermodynamic parameters along with experimental conditions, methods, etc. In addition, the supplementary information such as sequence, structure and the other functional details are also given. We have provided a Web interface to help users searching for the data with required conditions and sorting formats, and visualizing the results through the Internet. We report here the current status of the ProNIT database.