PROFUSE: Automation of large-scale protein functional sequence analysis

• Research unit: EU RFP
• Project number: 01.0071

Key words (English)

Database; annotation; protein function prediction; sequence analysis

Alternative project number (English)

EU project number: QLRI-CT-2000-00517

Research programs (English)

EU-programme: 5. Frame Research Programme - 1.1.9 Support for research infrastructures

Short description (English)

See abstract

Partners and International Organizations (English)

Coordiantor: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg (D)

Abstract (English)

With the rapid growth of sequence databases, there is an increasing need for reliable functional annotation of newly predicted proteins, and assessing the relationship between proteins within and between species. To cope with such data volumes, faster and more effective means of creating annotation are required. One promising approach is automatic annotation, which is generated with limited human interaction. The objective of the ProFuSe project is to develop and make available to the community of researchers a system to produce automatic functional classification and annotation of proteins. This system will also be applied to all uncharacterised proteins publicly available.
The ProFuSe project is built on the InterPro database, an integrated resource of descriptors used to identify functionnal regions in proteins.
To have a powerfool automated annotation tool one must have as many descriptors as possible to assign biological function to new proteins. During the first year of founding the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) was involved in the production of new descriptors and provided a short documentation of the domain or the family identified by each descriptor. Our group also checked the quality and consistancy of the automatic annotation produced by the different tools developped in the ProFuSe project. The SIB is responsible for the maintenance of the SWISS-PROT database. As the SWISS-PROT database is the template for the annotation transferred to new proteins, we also checked
the reliability of the functional annotation in SWISS-PROT and developed different tools to improve it.

References in databases (English)

Swiss Database: Euro-DB of the
State Secretariat for Education and Research
Hallwylstrasse 4
CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland
Tel. [phone]
Swiss Project-Number: 01.0071