Nextprot: the new human protein knowledge resource

In September 2008, the UniProt/Swiss-Prot group achieved a major milestone: the first complete manual annotation of the full set of human proteins (derived from about 20'000 genes). This corpus of data which isquite rich in information pertinent to modern biomolecular medical research, clearly shows that there is a large gap in our knowledge of human proteins in terms of functional information as well as protein characterization (PTMs, protein/protein interactions, subcellular locations, etc). This gap resides not only in the available experimental information, but also in the way this information has been stored, which is far from being sufficient to help researchers making sense of what all these human proteins do in our bodies! Therefore, in the framework of CALIPHO, a new interdisciplinary group created jointly by the University of Geneva and the SIB, we are developing neXtProt, a new human-centric protein knowledge resource.