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Missing in action: enzyme functional annotations in biological databases

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Annotations of enzyme function provide critical starting points for generating and testing biological hypotheses, but the quality of functional annotations is hindered by uncertain assignments for uncharacterized sequences and by the relative sparseness of validated experimental data. Given the relentless increase in genomic data, new thinking and validation methods are urgently needed to provide high confidence in enzyme functional assignments.

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Figure 1: Overview of the UniProtKB annotation process.
Figure 2
Figure 3: The conservation of E.C. by homology in the CSA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nicholas Furnham, John S. Garavelli, Rolf Apweiler and Janet M. Thornton are in the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK.,

    Nicholas Furnham, John S Garavelli, Rolf Apweiler & Janet M Thornton

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  1. Nicholas Furnham
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  2. John S Garavelli
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  3. Rolf Apweiler
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  4. Janet M Thornton
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Correspondence to Nicholas Furnham.

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Furnham, N., Garavelli, J., Apweiler, R. et al. Missing in action: enzyme functional annotations in biological databases. Nat Chem Biol 5, 521–525 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio0809-521

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