Frontiers in Genetics (Jun 2015)
PrOnto Database : GO term functional dissimilarity inferred from biological data.
Abstract
Moonlighting proteins are defined by their involvement in multiple, unrelated functions. The computational prediction of such proteins requires a formal method of assessing the similarity of cellular processes, for example, by identifying dissimilar Gene Ontology terms. While manymeasures of Gene Ontology term similarity exist, most depend on abstract mathematical analyses of the structure of the GO tree and do not necessarily represent the underlying biology. Here, we propose two metrics of GO term functional similarity derived from biological information, one based on the protein annotations and the other on the interactions between proteins. They have been collected in the PrOnto database, a novel tool that can be of particular use for the identification of moonlighting proteins. The database can be queried via an web-based interface which is freely available at http://tagc.univ-mrs.fr/pronto.
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