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Lipid modification of the N-terminal Cys residue (N-acyl-S-diacylglyceryl-Cys) has been found to be an essential, ubiquitous, and unique bacterial posttranslational modification. Such a modification allows anchoring of even highly hydrophilic proteins to the membrane which carry out a variety of functions important for bacteria, including pathogenesis. Hence, being able to identify such proteins is of great value. To this end, we have created a comprehensive database of bacterial lipoproteins, called DOLOP, which contains information and links to molecular details for about 278 distinct lipoproteins and predicted lipoproteins from 234 completely sequenced bacterial genomes. The website also features a tool that applies a predictive algorithm to identify the presence or absence of the lipoprotein signal sequence in a user-given sequence. The experimentally verified lipoproteins have been classified into different functional classes and more importantly functional domain assignments using hidden Markov models from the SUPERFAMILY database that have been provided for the predicted lipoproteins. Other features include the following: primary sequence analysis, signal sequence analysis, and search facility and information exchange facility to allow researchers to exchange results on newly characterized lipoproteins. The website, along with additional information on the biosynthetic pathway, statistics on predicted lipoproteins, and related figures, is available at http://www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/genomes/dolop/.

Bacterial lipoproteins and lipid modification are gaining importance owing to their essential nature, roles in pathogenesis and interesting commercial applications. We have created an exclusive knowledge base for bacterial lipoproteins by processing information from 510 entries to provide a list of 199 distinct lipoproteins with relevant links to molecular details. Features include functional classification, predictive algorithm for query sequences, primary sequence analysis and lists of predicted lipoproteins from 43 completed bacterial genomes along with interactive information exchange facility.
AVAILABILITY: The website called Database Of bacterial LipOProteins (DOLOP) is available at http://www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/genomes/dolop along with additional information on the biosynthetic pathway, supplementary material and other related figures.