The Kabat Database and a Bioinformatics Example

In 1969, Elvin A. Kabat of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and Tai Te Wu of Cornell University Medical College began to collect and align amino acid sequences of human and mouse Bence Jones proteins and immunoglobulin (Ig) light chains. This was the beginning of the Kabat Database . They used a simple mathematical formula to calculate the various amino acid substitutions at each position and predict the precise locations of segments of the light-chain variable region that would form the antibody-combining site from a variability plot (1 ). The Kabat Database is one of the oldest biological sequence databases, and for many years was the only sequence database with alignment information.