BioCurator Discussion Topics

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Project Information.

(Please edit below and add information about your project. Add your project if it is not listed below.)

Number of papers annotated per year?

manually curate about 3200 papers per year for chemical-gene interactions, chemical-disease associations, & gene-disease associations
  • dictyBase
  • DIP
about 1000/year; protein-protein interactions only
  • SGD
  • TAIR
  • RGD
  • UCL
  • UniProtKB
  • WormBase
  • Zfin
  • SABIO-RK
about 500/year; kinetic data only

What should be in a publication?

chemical name (or CAS #), official gene symbol (or Entrez-Gene ID or sequence ID) prefaced with species (e.g, mouse Hoxd11, human TP53, zebrafish nrf1) mentioned at least once somewhere in paper, disease name, species used
  • dictyBase
  • DIP
bare minimum:
gene/protein/EST/etc name (as used in the paper), database identifier, species (taxon id) provided for every gene/protein/DNA fragment used in the paper (including controls)
useful(but, IMHO, optional):
fuctional annotation as on TAIR/Plant Physiology page
unrealistic:
formalized annotation of individual experiments
NOTE: If given a choice between a bare minimum now and useful additional information sometime in the future I (Lukasz) would take the former as consistently providing all DB identifiers already saves a LOT of work
  • SGD
  • TAIR
  • RGD
  • UCL
  • UniProtKB
  • WormBase
  • Zfin
  • SABIO-RK
In general extensive use of identifiers and controlled vocabularies (e.g.taxonID, GO terms..)
Identity of the enzymes
Enzyme Name, EC-Number Name, preferably the accepted name from the IUBMB Enzyme List
Organism/species & strain; Sequence accession number; Isoenzyme
Additional information on the enzyme
Tissue/organelle; Localization; Post-translational modification
Assay conditions
Measured reaction as a stoichiometrically balanced equation; Assay temperature; Assay pH; Buffer & concentrations; Metal salt(s) & concentrations; Other assay components; Substrates & concentrations; Enzyme/protein concentration
Methodology
Assay method a literature reference may suffice for an established procedure that is used without modification; Type of assay e.g., continuous or discontinuous, direct or coupled, direction of the assay; Reactant determined; Reaction stoichiometry
Additional information desirable
Total assay mixture ionic strength; free metal cation concentrations; Reaction equilibrium constant
Data necessary for reporting kinetic parameters
Vmax; kcat; kcat/Km; Km;S0.5 Both given as concentrations, e.g., mM; Hill coefficient; How was the given parameter obtained?
Data required for reporting inhibition data
competitive, uncompetitive, etc.; Type and KI values with units and how they were determined
Required information for all enzyme functional data
Indication of accuracy e.g. standard error of the mean, standard deviation, confidence limmits, quartils; Specification whether relative to subunit or oligomeric form
Additional material desirable
Kinetic mechanism e.g. ordered bi-bi; kinetic law (equation)

Suggested text for a letter to journal editors

(Please edit here and include your thoughts.)

Here's a rough draft of the idea we (ie DIP, hopefully with support of as many databases as possible) would like to persuade the journal editors to (Lukasz/DIP):

Recent years have seen a rapid increase in the quantity of biological data published in research papers. As the volume of the data increases, it is of utmost importance to organize and combine it in a systematic way. This is one of the primary roles of the numerous biological databases: RCSB, GenBank, UniProt, SwissProt, DIP, IntAct, MINT, SGD (yeast), FlyBase, WormBase, TAIR (Arabidopsis), RGD (rat) and many others.

With the exception of RCSB and GenBank, where direct data deposition by the authors is imposed by journal editors and/or funding agencies, biological databases generally depend on curators to manually extract individual pieces of information from research papers. This curation is labor-intensive, and curators agree that the major stumbling block to efficient curation of biological literature is incomplete and/or ambigous information about the identity of the biomolecules and genes studied. Every curator can provide horror stories of tracing the identity of a single protein used in a paper through a chain of 'prepared as described in...' and 'obtained as a gift from...' phrases only to discover at the end of the trail that it is still impossible to identify the protein's species of origin without contacting the authors (1). The problem seems to be universal across every journal and every database with which we have contact.

Over the years, researchers have raised this issue in numerous commentaries, reviews and editorials, mostly without any response. Two recent initiatives, however, seem to suggest that the situation is changing. TAIR has initiated a partnership with Plant Physiology journal (2) aimed at capturing as much functional data as possible with minimal burden imposed on both the journal editorial office and the authors. Similarly, FEBS Letters (3), in collaboration with the MINT database, is recruiting authors to capture protein interaction data.

While we are enthusiastic about these attempts, we realize that the scope of the problem is much broader. Curation efforts of many individual databases would become instantaneously more efficient if a list of biomolecules and genes, each with a reference to the relevant database, were published as a simple electronic supplement available to every journal reader. We believe it would translate into rapid dissemination of the information from such papers to many diverse databases. As every database references the original data source, the supplement would improve database coverage and increase the visiblity of both individual articles and the journals in which they are published.

We (as DIP, but also as a member of the biocurator forum that includes CGD, dictyBase, DIP, SGD, TAIR, RGD, UniProt, WormBase, Zfin; and as a member of the IMEx consortium of interaction databases grouping DIP, IntAct, MINT, MPact, BioGRID) wonder if your journal, XXX, would be willing to implement a policy requiring the authors of the accepted papers to prepare, with the help of the database community, an electronic supplement file listing all the biomolecules and genes studied in the manuscript. One possible approach would be to implement a form similar to the one prepared by TAIR for Plant Physiology (view at http://www.aspb.org/publications/tairsubmission.cfm ) that would produce, as the output, a file to be included as part of the article's electronic supplement.

References:

(1) most recent example from PNAS: Bartsch S, Monnet J, Selbach K, Quigley F, Gray J, von Wettstein D, Reinbothe S, Reinbothe C PNAS 105(12):4933-8 (2008) Three thioredoxin targets in the inner envelope membrane of chloroplasts function in protein import and chlorophyll metabolism.

There's absolutely to way to identify Trx protein used in experiments described in Fig 1. The result is 6 interactions of this protein are lost for DIP, IntAct, MINT databases; the same holds for any other functional data reported in the paper.

(2) Plant Physiology 146:1022-1023 (2008) Plant Physiology and TAIR Partnership

(3) Superti-Furga G, Wieland F, Cesareni G Finally: The digital, democratic age of scientific abstracts FEBS Letters 582(8),1169