The Gene Ontology (GO) is a major bioinformatics initiative to unify the representation of gene and gene product attributes across all species. More specifically, the project aims to: 1) maintain and develop its controlled vocabulary of gene and gene product attributes; 2) annotate genes and gene products, and assimilate and disseminate annotation data; and 3) provide tools for easy access to all aspects of the data provided by the project, and to enable functional interpretation of experimental data using the GO, for example via enrichment analysis. GO is part of a larger classification effort, the Open Biomedical Ontologies, being one of the Initial Candidate Members of the OBO Foundry.
UniProt is a freely accessible database of protein sequence and functional information, many entries being derived from genome sequencing projects. It contains a large amount of information about the biological function of proteins derived from the research literature. It is maintained by the UniProt consortium, which consists of several European bioinformatics organisations and a foundation from Washington, DC, USA.
BRENDA is the world's most comprehensive online database for functional, biochemical and molecular biological data on enzymes, metabolites and metabolic pathways. It contains data on the properties, function and significance of all enzymes classified by the Enzyme Commission of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB) classified enzymes. As ELIXIR Core Data Resource, BRENDA is considered a data resource of critical importance to the international life sciences research community. The database compiles a representative overview of enzymes and metabolites using current research data from primary scientific literature and thus serves the purpose of facilitating information retrieval for researchers. BRENDA is subject to the terms of the Creative Commons license, is accessible worldwide and can be used free of charge. As one of the digital resources of the Leibniz Institute DSMZ-German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures, BRENDA is part of the integrated biodata infrastructure DSMZ Digital Diversity.
The Protein Information Resource (PIR), located at Georgetown University Medical Center, is an integrated public bioinformatics resource to support genomic and proteomic research, and scientific studies. It contains protein sequences databases
Ensembl genome database project is a scientific project at the European Bioinformatics Institute, which provides a centralized resource for geneticists, molecular biologists and other researchers studying the genomes of our own species and other vertebrates and model organisms. Ensembl is one of several well known genome browsers for the retrieval of genomic information.
The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) is an intergovernmental organization (IGO) which, as part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) family, focuses on research and services in bioinformatics. It is located on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton near Cambridge, and employs over 600 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff.
InterPro is a database of protein families, protein domains and functional sites in which identifiable features found in known proteins can be applied to new protein sequences in order to functionally characterise them.
PROSITE is a protein database. It consists of entries describing the protein families, domains and functional sites as well as amino acid patterns and profiles in them. These are manually curated by a team of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and tightly integrated into Swiss-Prot protein annotation. PROSITE was created in 1988 by Amos Bairoch, who directed the group for more than 20 years. Since July 2018, the director of PROSITE and Swiss-Prot is Alan Bridge.
Expasy is an online bioinformatics resource operated by the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. It is an extensible and integrative portal which provides access to over 160 databases and software tools and supports a range of life science and clinical research areas, from genomics, proteomics and structural biology, to evolution and phylogeny, systems biology and medical chemistry. The individual resources are hosted in a decentralized way by different groups of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and partner institutions.
The Pathogen-Host Interactions database (PHI-base) is a biological database that contains manually curated information on genes experimentally proven to affect the outcome of pathogen-host interactions. The database has been maintained by researchers at Rothamsted Research and external collaborators since 2005. PHI-base has been part of the UK node of ELIXIR, the European life-science infrastructure for biological information, since 2016.
MicrobesOnline is a publicly and freely accessible website that hosts multiple comparative genomic tools for comparing microbial species at the genomic, transcriptomic and functional levels. MicrobesOnline was developed by the Virtual Institute for Microbial Stress and Survival, which is based at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. The site was launched in 2005, with regular updates until 2011.
SUPERFAMILY is a database and search platform of structural and functional annotation for all proteins and genomes. It classifies amino acid sequences into known structural domains, especially into SCOP superfamilies. Domains are functional, structural, and evolutionary units that form proteins. Domains of common Ancestry are grouped into superfamilies. The domains and domain superfamilies are defined and described in SCOP. Superfamilies are groups of proteins which have structural evidence to support a common evolutionary ancestor but may not have detectable sequence homology.
In molecular biology and genetics, DNA annotation or genome annotation is the process of describing the structure and function of the components of a genome, by analyzing and interpreting them in order to extract their biological significance and understand the biological processes in which they participate. Among other things, it identifies the locations of genes and all the coding regions in a genome and determines what those genes do.
OMPdb is a dedicated database that contains beta barrel (β-barrel) outer membrane proteins from Gram-negative bacteria. Such proteins are responsible for a broad range of important functions, like passive nutrient uptake, active transport of large molecules, protein secretion, as well as adhesion to host cells, through which bacteria expose their virulence activity.
In bioinformatics, the PANTHER classification system is a large curated biological database of gene/protein families and their functionally related subfamilies that can be used to classify and identify the function of gene products. PANTHER is part of the Gene Ontology Reference Genome Project designed to classify proteins and their genes for high-throughput analysis.
In molecular biology, MobiDB is a curated biological database designed to offer a centralized resource for annotations of intrinsic protein disorder. Protein disorder is a structural feature characterizing a large number of proteins with prominent members known as intrinsically unstructured proteins. The database features three levels of annotation: manually curated, indirect and predicted. By combining different data sources of protein disorder into a consensus annotation, MobiDB aims at giving the best possible picture of the "disorder landscape" of a given protein of interest.
In molecular biology, MvirDB was a publicly available database that stored information on toxins, virulence factors and antibiotic resistance genes. Sources that this database used for DNA and protein information included: Tox-Prot, SCORPION, the PRINTS Virulence Factors, VFDB, TVFac, Islander, ARGO and VIDA. The database provided a BLAST tool that allowed the user to query their sequence against all DNA and protein sequences in MvirDB. Information on virulence factors could be obtained from the usage of the provided browser tool. Once the browser tool was used, the results were returned as a readable table that was organized by ascending E-Values, each of which were hyperlinked to their related page. MvirDB was implemented in an Oracle 10g relational database. MvirDB appears to have been inactive for some time, and is therefore not current. The last available snapshot was made on August 2, 2017.
Biocuration is the field of life sciences dedicated to organizing biomedical data, information and knowledge into structured formats, such as spreadsheets, tables and knowledge graphs. The biocuration of biomedical knowledge is made possible by the cooperative work of biocurators, software developers and bioinformaticians and is at the base of the work of biological databases.
