The Protein Kinase Resource: everything you always wanted to know about protein kinases but were afraid to ask

Protein kinases and phosphatases play crucial roles in all the major cellular processes, such as signal transduction, cell differentiation, cell proliferation and cell cycle progression. Protein phosphorylation or dephosphorylation can form the basis of many critical processes, including enzyme activation or inactivation, protein localization and protein degradation. Given the importance of protein kinases to cellular development and function, it is critical that there are effective ways of disseminating information on protein kinases to the research community. This review describes such a web resource, ‘The Protein Kinase Resource’ (http://pkr.sdsc.edu/html/index.shtml), which serves as a repository for cellular and molecular data on protein kinases.