•  Structure-based activity prediction for an enzyme of unknown function

Hermann et al. have recently published a paper in Nature suggesting  structure-based docking with high-energy forms of potential substrates may be a useful tool to annotate enzymes for function.  When proteins are unrelated to others of known activity, bioinformatics inference for function becomes problematic. It would thus be useful to interrogate protein structures for function directly. They have used the thermophilic bacterium Thermotoga maritima for docking experiments and have verified their results by X-ray crystallography. Original article is accessible here. 

  • Annotation Guidelines for Proteins  

iProLINK (integrated Protein Literature, INformation and Knowledge) has been developed as a resource to facilitate text mining in the area of literature-based database curation, named entity recognition, and protein ontology development. The collection of data sources can be utilized by computational and biological researchers to explore literature information on proteins and their features or properties (Hu et al., 2004). This source can be accessed through http://pir.georgetown.edu/pirwww/iprolink/