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14 NSFBIO:Bilateral BBSRC-NSF/BIO Collaborative Research: ABI Development: A Critical Assessment of Protein Function Annotation

Reference	BB/N004876/1
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Dr Maria J. Martin
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors	Ms Michele Magrane, Ms Claire O'Donovan
Institution	EMBL - European Bioinformatics Institute
Department	Sequence Database Group
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	349,848
Status	Completed
Type	Research Grant
Start date	01/09/2015
End date	31/08/2018
Duration	36 months

Abstract

The accurate annotation of protein function is key to understanding life. However, with its inherent difficulty and expense, experimental characterization of function cannot scale up to accommodate the vast amount of sequence data already available. Therefore, the computational annotation of protein function is of primary importance. It is now possible to collect data that comprehensively profile many different states of complex biological systems. Using these data it should be possible to understand and explain the underlying systems, but significant challenges remain. One of the primary challenges is that, as researchers collect more data from many different organisms in many different systems, they discover more and different genes. Assigning functions to these newly discovered genes represents a key step towards interpretation of high-throughput data. The mission of the Automated Function Prediction Special Interest Group (AFP-SIG), founded in 2005, is to bring together bioinformaticians and biologists who are addressing this key challenge of gene function prediction. AFP-SIG has created CAFA: the Critical Assessment of (protein) Function Annotation. CAFA is a community-driven challenge to assess the performance of protein function prediction software, and it has been carried out twice since 2010. The investigators will provide the following outcomes: (1) robust open-source software to be used in function prediction and assessment of function prediction methods, incorporated into the high-profile annotation pipelines of UniProt-GOA; (2) expansion of the AFP community by engaging bioinformaticians, biocurators and experimentalists, thereby improving the quality aquality and relevance of function prediction methods; (3) large-scale experimental screens in Drosophila, Candida and Pseudomonas for novel associations of targeted functional terms with genes; (4) a CAFA event, incorporating both the curated annotations from the literature and our experimental screens.

Summary

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Impact Summary

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Committee	Research Committee D (Molecules, cells and industrial biotechnology)
Research Topics	Technology and Methods Development
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	UK BBSRC-US NSF/BIO (NSFBIO) [2014]
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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