Summaries and aggregate results are provided in standardized format describing the information that would otherwise have required visits to many smaller sites or direct literature searches to compile.
Many sequence profiling tools are software portals or gateways that simplify the process of finding information about a query in the large and growing number of bioinformatics databases.
Typical scenarios of a profiling approach become relevant, particularly, in the cases of the first two groups, where researchers commonly wish to combine information derived from several sources about a single query or target sequence.
However, specialized tools organized and hosted by specific research groups can be difficult to integrate into this linkage effort because they are narrowly focused, are frequently modified, or use custom versions of common file formats.
The user, upon visiting the site/tool, enters any relevant information like a keyword e.g. dystrophy, diabetes etc., or GenBank accession numbers, PDB ID.
For example, the NCBI search engine Entrez segregates its hits by category, so that users looking for protein structure information can screen out sequences with no corresponding structure, while users interested in perusing the literature on a subject can view abstracts of papers published in scholarly journals without distraction from gene or sequence results.
The pros of developing manually curated databases include presentation of proofread material and the concept of ‘molecule authorities’ to undertake the responsibility of specific proteins.
Such tools are also commonly supplied with commercial laboratory equipment like gene sequencers or sometimes sold as software applications for molecular biology.
The tool provides added advantage of maintaining a research log of the operations performed by the user, which can be then conveniently archived using 'mail', 'print' or 'save' functionality.