DbW takes advantage of the multiple alignment of a protein functional family in order to first characterize the specificity of the sequences and then filter the new sequences detected regularly by searching the SwissProt and SPTREMBL databases to exclude functionally unrelated sequences. 

By default, the program takes as input a multiple alignment of the protein functional family. However, DbW has been extended to be able to generate the multiple alignment from a single input sequence. As a result, only the functional family related sequences will be regularly selected and integrated in a complete multiple alignment proposed via e-mail to the user.