Expert curation in UniProtKB: a case study on dealing with conflicting and erroneous data

By S. Poux, Michele Magrane, C. Arighi, A. Bridge, C. O’Donovan, K. Laiho. 2014

69 citations recorded by the source corpus.

UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot provides expert curation with information extracted from literature and curator-evaluated computational analysis. As knowledgebases continue to play an increasingly important role in scientific research, a number of studies have evaluated their accuracy and revealed various errors. While some are curation errors, others are the result of incorrect information published in the scientific literature. By taking the example of sirtuin-5, a complex annotation case, we will describe the curation procedure of UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot and detail how we report conflicting information in the database. We will demonstrate the importance of collaboration between resources to ensure curation consistency and the value of contributions from the user community in helping maintain error-free resources. Database URL: www.uniprot.org

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Biophysics, Molecular Biology

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Citations in the corpus

UniProt: the universal protein knowledgebase (2016, background): “…is the identification of relevant high-quality articles that allow for the comprehensive curation of a protein and literature selection is made according to well-established criteria which have been documented elsewhere (see (9) for a description of categories of literature that are prioritized).”
UniProt: a hub for protein information (2014, methodology): “This section grows as new proteins are experimentally characterized (1).”
Genetic variations and diseases in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot: The ins and outs of expert manual curation (2014, methodology): “Once a publication has been selected for annotation, the whole text is critically read and pertinent information is reported in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot as described elsewhere [Poux et al., 2014].”
The UniProtKB guide to the human proteome (2016, background): “For more information regarding expert curation, read (18, 19).”
Archaeal Clusters of Orthologous Genes (arCOGs): An Update and Application for Analysis of Shared Features between Thermococcales, Methanococcales, and Methanobacteriales (2015, methodology): “However, to attain accurate orthology identification and functional prediction, clusters produced by each of these approaches require continuous expert curation and additional methods such as phylogenetic analysis [5–9].”