Question

Which of the following is not an advantageous feature or algorithm of the database PRINTS?

(a) This program breaks down a motif into even smaller non-overlapping units called ‘fingerprints’, which are represented by unweighted PSSMs

(b) To define a motif, at least a majority of fingerprints are required to match with a query sequence

(c) A query that has simultaneous high-scoring matches to a majority of fingerprints belonging to a motif is a good indication of containing the functional motif

(d) The difficulty to recognize short motifs when they reach the size of single fingerprints

This question was addressed to me during a job interview.

Asked question is from Motif and Domain Databases Using Statistical Models in portion Sequence Alignment of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

The correct choice is (d) The difficulty to recognize short motifs when they reach the size of single fingerprints

To explain I would say: PRINTS is a protein fingerprint database containing ungapped, manually curated alignments corresponding to the most conserved regions among related sequences. The drawbacks of PRINTS are–the difficulty to recognize short motifs when they reach the size of single fingerprints and a relatively small database, which restricts detection of many motifs.