A declarative query language for protein secondary structures

Searching proteins on their secondary structures provides a rough and fast method of identification of molecules having a similar fold. Since existing database management systems do not offer integrated exploration methods for querying protein structures, the structural similarity searching is usually performed by external tools. This often lengthens the processing time and requires additional processing steps, like adaptation of input and output data formats. In the paper, we present the extended SQL language, which allows searching a database in order to find proteins having secondary structures similar to the structural pattern specified by a user. Presented query language is integrated with the relational database management system and it simplifies the manipulation of biological data.