Fast Breaking Comment by Nicola Mulder

Nicola Mulder answers a few questions about this month's fast breaking paper in the field of Biology & Biochemistry.

From •>>June 2004

Field: Biology & Biochemistry
Article Title: The InterPro Database, 2003 brings increased coverage and new features
Authors: Mulder, NJ;Apweiler, R;Attwood, TK;Bairoch, A;Barrell, D;Bateman, A;Binns, D;Biswas, M;Bradley, P;Bork, P;Bucher, P;Copley, RR;Courcelle, E;Das, U;Durbin, R;Falquet, L;Fleischmann, W;Griffiths-Jones, S;Haft, D;Harte, N;Hulo, N;Kahn, D;Kanapin, A;Krestyaninova, M;Lopez, R;Letunic, I;Lonsdale, D;Silventoinen, V;Orchard, SE;Pagni, M;Peyruc, D;Ponting, CP;Selengut, JD;Servant, F;Sigrist, CJA;Vaughan, R;Zdobnov, EM
Journal: NUCL ACID RES
Volume: 31
Page: 315-318
Year: JAN 1 2003
* European Bioinformat Inst, EMBL Outstn, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Cambridge, England.
* European Bioinformat Inst, EMBL Outstn, Cambridge, England.
* Wellcome Trust Sanger Inst, Cambridge, England.
* Univ Manchester, Dept Comp Sci, Manchester M13 9PL, Lancs, England.
* Univ Manchester, Sch Biol Sci, Manchester, Lancs, England.
* Swiss Inst Bioinformat, Geneva, Switzerland.
* ViaLactia Biosci, Newmarket Auckland, New Zealand.
* Biocomp Unit EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany.
* Swiss Inst Expt Canc Res, Lausanne, Switzerland.
* Wellcome Trust Ctr Human Genet, Oxford, England.
* CNRS, INRA, Toulouse, France.
* Inst Genome Res, Rockville, MD USA.
* Univ Oxford, Dept Human Anat & Genet, MRC, Funct Genet Unit, Oxford OX1 2JD, England.
* EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany.


	July 1, 2004: This paper has also been named the New Hot Paper in Biology & Biochemistry for July 2004.

Why do you think your paper is highly cited?

“The paper describes a tool that is used for analysing protein sequences
and assigning a function to them.”

It is relevant to proteomics and genomics, describes a tool that can be and is used by all researchers at the bench, and is involved in large-scale data analysis.

Does it describe a new discovery or a new methodology that's useful to others?

Yes, these are new tools and a new database that unifies existing but disparate ones.

How did you become involved in this research?

My involvement came about through my position at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI).

Could you summarize the significance of your paper in layman's terms?

The paper describes a tool that is used for analyzing protein sequences and assigning a function to them. The methods involved use similarities between related protein sequences as a means to describe what the characteristics of a protein family should be. When new protein sequences arrive, it is then possible to see which descriptions they fit to assign them to a protein family, and thus provide an idea of their function. This is significant since there are so many new proteins with unknown functions and the rate at which they appear makes it entirely impossible to characterize them all in the laboratory. The predicted functions from InterPro provide a suggestion of the biochemical analyses to perform in order to confirm the function. It narrows the possibilities.

Dr. Nicola Mulder
InterPro Project Manager
European Bioinformatics Institute
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus
Hinxton, Cambridge, U.K.

Read comments by co-author (of this paper) Bateman, A; about a previously selected Fast Breaking Paper.

ESI Special Topics, June 2004
Citing URL - http://www.esi-topics.com/fbp/2004/june04-NicolaMulder.html