Chain of Evidence (Archived)

Chain of Evidence

Background

Often curators are faced with a situation where they review the entire body of literature for a gene product and use the comprehensive knowledge to make an annotation or use multiple lines of evidence from a single paper to support an annotation and one piece of evidence alone cannot support the annotation on its own. Although the individual groups have ways to display the evidence in a nested manner to imply that multiple pieces of evidence contributed to that annotation, the GAF file lists one annotation in a row and this situation is less than satisfactory. Can we come up with a system to encode the chain of evidence in an annotation so that it is machine readable and makes sense to a bench biologist.