ribosome@gentoo.org Olivier Fisette sci-biology Amino acid indices and similarity matrices maintained at Kyoto University. An amino acid index is a set of 20 numerical values representing any of the different physicochemical and biological properties of amino acids. The AAindex1 section of the Amino Acid Index Database is a collection of published indices together with the result of cluster analysis using the correlation coefficient as the distance between two indices. This section currently contains 494 indices. Another important feature of amino acids that can be represented numerically is the similarity between amino acids. Thus, a similarity matrix, also called a mutation matrix, is a set of 210 numerical values, 20 diagonal and 20x19/2 off-diagonal elements, used for sequence alignments and similarity searches. The AAindex2 section of the Amino Acid Index Database is a collection of published amino acid mutation matrices together with the result of cluster analysis. This section currently contains 83 matrices.