Automatic Annotation of New Genomes

As the speed at which entire genomes can be sequenced and assembled increases, the need for the transfer of functional information from model organisms onto the protein coding genes derived from less well studied, but related, organisms increases. This talk will look at the use of InterPro, a resource that enables the functional analysis of proteins by classifying them into families and predicting domains and important sites. Protein signatures are combined from a number of member databases into a single searchable resource, capitalising on their individual strengths to produce a powerful integrated database and diagnostic tool. In addition to enabling an initial functional classification of a genome through the use of  the InterProScan toolkit, InterPro also provides the mechanism by which information transfer can occur. Informationn can also be trasferred across species using orthology mapping. Reactome is a multi-site collaboration to develop an open source, curated bioinformatics database of human pathways and reactions. It includes annotations, pathways and tools for pathway browsing and analysis, including pathway assignment and overrepresentation analysis of user-supplied data sets. Making use of orthology prediction, Reactome also provides cross-species pathway inference for a large number of model organisms.