The identification of G-protein coupled receptors in sequence databases

In the race to identify high quality drug targets from the enormous amount of information generated by the Human Genome Project, many companies are focussing their efforts on proteins already known to be good therapeutic targets. The G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) represent the most common class of therapeutic target. In this review we explore the sequence attributes of GPCRs and outline how these might be applied to focused database searches for novel GPCRs and to efficiently evaluate these new gene products pharmacologically.