Microtubules are major fibrous elements in eukaryotic cells, which are involved in the formation of cell structure. Microtubules are essential for a wide variety of cellular functions such as cell division, intracellular transport, signal transduction as well as gene expression and regulation. In vivo, the biological function of microtubule is controlled by a variety of microtubule associated proteins (MAPs). Figure 1 shows some representative members of MAPs.
In recent years, a battery of novel MAPs have been discovered and a few potential representative motifs of MAPs have been proposed. Nevertheless, our understanding of the mechanisms of microtubules binding is still limited. Besides, information about MAPs is distributed in different references, which is hard for researchers to summarize. Here, a core dataset of MAPs have been manually collected by literature reading. Furthermore, representative sequence motifs of MAPs were extracted from the core dataset by computational methods and were used to build a MAP prediction model. Finally, a database of MAPs (including the core dataset and the automatically extended dataset) and the MAP prediction tool are made available as the MAP analysis tool, MAPanalyzer (http://systbio.cau.edu.cn/mappred/).