Molecular Recognition Features (MoRFs) are short, intrinsically-disordered regions in proteins that undergo a disorder-to-order transition upon binding to their partners. MoRFs are implicated in protein-protein interactions, which serve as the initial step in molecular recognition.

The aim of this work was to collect, organize and store all membrane proteins that contain MoRFs. We focused in membrane proteins, as they constitute one third of fully sequenced proteomes and are responsible for a wide variety of cellular functions. Data were initially collected from Protein Data Bank (PDB) and Uniprot and were managed with Perl scripts. MoRFs were classified according to their secondary structure, after interacting with their partners. We identified MoRFs both in transmembrane and peripheral proteins. The position of transmembrane protein MoRFs was determined relative to a protein’s topology.

All information was stored in a publicly available mySQL database with a user-friendly web interface. A Jmol applet is integrated for visualization of the structures. The utility of the database is the provision of information related to disordered based protein-protein interactions in membrane proteins. Such proteins play key roles in crucial biological functions and ca. 50% of them are putative hubs in protein interaction networks. Consequently, these proteins may be correlated with various human diseases. The database will be updated on a regular basis by an automated procedure.