Annotating the Genome Using InterPro and the Gene Ontology

InterPro is a resource that provides functional analysis of protein sequences by classifying them into families and predicting the presence of domains and important sites. To classify proteins in this way, InterPro uses predictive models, known as signatures, provided by several different databases (referred to as member databases) that make up the InterPro consortium. Member databases include Pfam, PANTHER, SUPERFAMILY and CATH-Gene3D, amongst others. InterPro is used by research scientists interested in the large-scale analysis of whole proteomes, genomes and metagenomes, as well as researchers seeking to characterise individual protein sequences. Within the EBI, InterPro is used to help annotate protein sequences in UniProtKB.The use of InterProScan will also be described, the software package that allows sequences to be scanned against InterPro's signatures.

The Gene Ontology defines concepts/classes used to describe gene function, and relationships between these concepts. It classifies functions along three aspects:molecular function - molecular activities of gene products; cellular component - where gene products are active; and biological process - pathways and larger processes made up of the activities of multiple gene products. Annotation is the process of assigning GO terms to gene products. The annotation data in the GO database is contributed by members of the GO Consortium, and the Consortium is continuously encouraging new groups to start contributing their annotations. Manual annotation is performed by curators reading papers and selecting pieces of evidence which enables the association of a Gene Ontology term with a specific gene product. InterproScan and InterPro2GO isused by the Gene Ontology Annotation group to automatically assign Gene Ontology terms to gene products from those organisms which have not been studied at the individual molecule level, for for which manual annotation of the genes and proteins is not possible. This process, and the use of the Gene Ontology as an analysis tool for 'Omics data, will be described in the workshop.