Alexey Murzin
Past Group Leader, Structural Studies
The Structural Classification of Proteins (SCOP) is an ongoing project established in 1994. We produced and maintained the SCOP database, a “periodic table” of proteins that provides a detailed and comprehensive description of the relationships of all known protein structures. Recently, we developed the SCOP2 database, a successor of SCOP that aims to overcome some limitations of the original classification and to accommodate new types of protein relationships.
We also explore new insights into protein folding and evolution, suggested by non-trivial relationships discovered during the classification of new protein families in SCOP and SCOP2.
We intend to realise the potential of SCOP to become an essential resource for the functional annotation of structurally characterised genomic proteins, as it has done previously for other areas of bioinformatics and computational biology.