Annotating Protein Function through Lexical Analysis

The rate at which expert annotators add the experimental information into more or less controlled vocabularies of databases snails along at an even slower pace. Most methods that annotate protein function exploit sequence similarity by transferring experimental information for homologues. A crucial development aiding such transfer is large-scale, work- and management-intensive projects aimed at developing a comprehensive ontology for gene-protein function, such as the Gene Ontology project. Some of these tools target parsing controlled vocabulary from databases; others venture at mining free texts from MEDLINE abstracts or full scientific papers.