Chaperonins are a diverse family of molecular chaperones present in the plastids, mitochondria, and cytoplasm of eukaryotes, bacteria and archaea. The family is divided into group I (CPN60, also known as Hsp60 or GroEL, found in bacteria, some archaea, mitochondria and plastids) and group II (CCT, TriC or thermosome, found in archaea and the eukaryotic cytoplasm).
Group I chaperonin sequences have been employed as targets for detection and identification of organisms and microbiome studies since a 549-567 bp segment of the cpn60 coding region is a molecular barcode that can be amplified with universal PCR primers.
Species level identification of bacteria can be achieved with as little as 150 bp of the cpn60 barcode.
The sequence data included in cpnDB is collected from public databases or generated by a network of collaborators exploiting the cpn60 target in clinical, phylogenetic and microbiome studies. The goal of the cpnDB project is to provide a manually curated, taxonomically broad collection of chaperonin sequences.
Latest version of cpnDB contents (under construction)
