What is Filter protein?

Protein sequences acquired from databases, alignment outputs, or manual entry frequently contain characters that fall outside the expected amino acid alphabet. Digits from copy-pasted annotations, whitespace from text editors, stop codon asterisks, and ambiguity codes can all cause downstream tools to reject input or produce incorrect results. Filter Protein strips or replaces these characters based on a configurable allowed set, producing clean sequences ready for analysis.

Amino acid alphabets

Not all 26 letters correspond to amino acids. The standard genetic code encodes 20 amino acids, each with a one-letter designation originally proposed by Margaret Oakley Dayhoff:

A (Ala), C (Cys), D (Asp), E (Glu), F (Phe), G (Gly), H (His), I (Ile), K (Lys), L (Leu), M (Met), N (Asn), P (Pro), Q (Gln), R (Arg), S (Ser), T (Thr), V (Val), W (Trp), Y (Tyr).

Beyond these, IUPAC nomenclature reserves additional letters for special or ambiguous residues:

The distinction matters for filtering. A sequence from mass spectrometry where D and N cannot be distinguished will use B; a sequence from a structure database might include U for selenocysteine. Choosing the wrong filter mode discards valid information.

How to use Filter Protein online

Filter Protein runs entirely in the browser on ProteinIQ. No data leaves the client, making it suitable for proprietary or sensitive sequences. Results appear instantly.

Input

Paste one or more protein sequences in FASTA format or plain text, or upload a file. The tool deliberately skips sequence validation on input, since cleaning invalid characters is the purpose.

Maximum file size: 10 MB.

Filter modes

Each mode defines a set of characters to keep. Everything outside the set is either deleted or replaced.

Replacement options

When a character falls outside the allowed set, it can be handled in two ways: deletion (the character is removed entirely, shortening the sequence) or replacement (the character is substituted with a placeholder).

Replacing with X rather than deleting preserves positional information. This matters when filtered sequences need to remain aligned with other data, such as secondary structure annotations or conservation scores that are indexed by residue position.

Output formatting

The output is downloadable in FASTA format.

Applications

Sequence filtering is a routine preprocessing step in bioinformatics workflows. A few common scenarios:

• Input sanitization: Tools like AlphaFold 2, ESMFold, and ProteinMPNN require strictly valid amino acid sequences and will fail on unexpected characters.
• Post-translation cleanup: DNA to Protein translation may produce stop codon symbols (*) that need removal before structural prediction.
• Alignment post-processing: Multiple sequence alignment tools such as MUSCLE5, MAFFT, and Clustal Omega insert gap characters that must be stripped before submitting to other analyses.
• Database submission: Sequence databases typically accept only the standard 20 amino acid letters and reject files containing formatting artifacts.
• Quality control: The character-level statistics in the output reveal exactly which non-standard characters were present and how many, useful for auditing data provenance.