GO annotation in InterPro: why stability does not indicate accuracy in a sea of changing annotations.

Journal: Database : the journal of biological databases and curation
Published Date:

Abstract

The removal of annotation from biological databases is often perceived as an indicator of erroneous annotation. As a corollary, annotation stability is considered to be a measure of reliability. However, diverse data-driven events can affect the stability of annotations in both primary protein sequence databases and the protein family databases that are built upon the sequence databases and used to help annotate them. Here, we describe some of these events and their consequences for the InterPro database, and demonstrate that annotation removal or reassignment is not always linked to incorrect annotation by the curator. Database URL: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/interpro.

Authors

  • Amaia Sangrador-Vegas
    European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SD, UK amaia@ebi.ac.uk.
  • Alex L Mitchell
    European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SD, UK.
  • Hsin-Yu Chang
    European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SD, UK.
  • Siew-Yit Yong
    European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SD, UK.
  • Robert D Finn
    European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SD, UK.