InterPro and Automatic Annotation of Non-Model Organism Proteomes

InterPro, a tool for annotation transfer

InterPro provides functional analysis of proteins by classifying them into families and predicting domains and important sites. The database combines protein signatures 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. InterProScan is a sequence analysis application (nucleotide and protein sequences) that combines different protein signature recognition methods into one resource, widely used by genome sequencing groups to predict the function of the coding genes in their organism of interest. The tool is used at the EBI for the transfer of annotation from well studied proteins which have been manually annotated by UniprotKB/Swiss-Prot and Gene Ontology curators to experimentally uncharacterised gens and protein in non-model organisms. The mechanism and rules for annotation transfer will be described and briefly discussed.