The membrane organization and subcellular location of a protein can provide information about its functional role. Historically, these data have been difficult to produce on a large scale for higher eukaryotic organisms. However, recent advances in membrane organization prediction methods and high-throughput subcellular localization assays have made it possible to generate these datasets.

LOCATE is a curated, web-accessible database that houses data describing the membrane organization and subcellular localization of proteins from the FANTOM3 Isoform Protein Sequence set. Membrane organization is predicted by the high-throughput, computational pipeline MemO. The subcellular locations of selected proteins from this set were determined by a high-throughput, immunofluorescence-based assay and by manually reviewing over 1700 peer-reviewed publications. The results of the MemO pipeline and the subcellular localization methods are stored in the database with supporting information including a graphical depiction of the membrane organization juxtaposed with InterPro-predicted features and links to several external databases. The database is searchable by subcellular location, protein class, descriptive keyword, and sequence similarity. The data are retrievable in human- and machine-readable formats and in batch.