Welcome to the SCOPe website!

SCOPe is a database developed at the Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley that extends SCOP (version 1). SCOPe classifies many structures released since SCOP 1.75 through a combination of automation and manual curation, and corrects some errors, aiming to have the same accuracy as the fully hand-curated SCOP releases. SCOPe also incorporates and updates the Astral database.

In addition to new SCOPe releases, the SCOPe website provides integrated access to data found in all releases of the SCOP and Astral databases that feature stable identifiers (i.e., those since release 1.55). A history of all changes between consecutive releases of SCOP and SCOPe is available under the Stats & History menu.

In order to facilitate use of SCOPe data by SCOP and Astral users, we provide SCOPe data in parseable files in the same formats as the SCOP and Astral databases. SCOPe uses the same stable identifiers (e.g., sunid, sid, sccs) as were used for prior releases of SCOP and Astral.

Authors

  • The SCOPe authors are Naomi K. Fox, Steven E. Brenner, and John-Marc Chandonia.
  • The SCOP authors are Alexey G. Murzin, John-Marc Chandonia, Antonina Andreeva, Dave Howorth, Loredana Lo Conte, Bartlett G. Ailey, Steven E. Brenner, Tim J. P. Hubbard, and Cyrus Chothia.
  • The ASTRAL authors are John-Marc Chandonia, Naomi K. Fox, Degui Zhi, Gary Hon, Loredana Lo Conte, Nigel Walker, Patrice Koehl, Michael Levitt, and Steven E. Brenner.
  • References to cite are on this page.

Mission

Nearly all proteins have structural similarities with other proteins, and in some of these cases, share a common evolutionary origin. The Structural Classification of Proteins — extended (SCOPe) knowledgebase aims to provide an accurate, detailed, and comprehensive description of the structural and evolutionary relationships amongst all proteins of known structure, along with resources for analyzing the protein structures and their sequences. By providing a broad survey of protein folds and authoritative information about relatives of proteins, particularly those too ancient to be readily recognized from sequence, SCOPe is a framework for future research and classification. SCOPe undertakes to provide interfaces and data to support all users of protein structure and evolutionary relationships, for research, education, and policy, at scales ranging from interactive exploration of relationships of proteins of interest, including nuances of their individual structures and variations, to comprehensive studies and methods that draw on the entirety of the protein universe. The SCOPe resource aims to be Findable/Accessible/Interoperable/Reusable (FAIR) and also equitable for all.

News

In this release, we have continued to take a very conservative approach to using automation to classify new structures: only full-length chains that could be confidently matched to existing, manually curated SCOP domains in the first 7 SCOP classes were added. We are continuing to benchmark our automated classification methods against prior versions of SCOP, to be sure the results of automation are completely consistent with manual curation. In addition, we corrected several more SCOP bugs in this release—click on the Stats & History menu for details.

Starting with this release, we will produce periodic updates (approximately monthly) that include confident automated classifications of newly released protein structures. The updates will include the latest structures, while less frequent stable releases will include bug fixes and will continue to provide a foundation for benchmarks. Parseable files for both stable releases and periodic updates will be made available under the Downloads menu.

This release is also the first to include a web interface that provides integrated access to data from prior versions of SCOPe, SCOP and Astral. To access prior releases, click on the Stats & History menu above.

Other improvements in SCOPe include an updated web interface (which is still being developed and improved), and a SQL back end (click the Downloads menu to obtain a copy).

SCOPe 2.02 was previously released to the public as SCOP 1.75B. No data have been harmed (or changed) in renaming the database.

License

All data in SCOPe (including the data from older releases of SCOP and Astral) are freely available to all users.

Pronunciation

There are several alternative pronunciations of the vowels in the word SCOPe. All are considered correct.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (R01-GM073109) through the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.