2013•Nucleic Acids ResearchOpen access
Protein Ontology: a controlled structured network of protein entities
Darren A. Natale, Cecilia N. Arighi, Judith A. Blake, Carol J. Bult, Karen Christie, Julie Cowart, Peter D’Eustachio, Alexander D. Diehl, Harold Drabkin, Olivia Helfer, Hongzhan Huang, Anna Maria Masci, Jia Ren, Natalia V. Roberts, Karen Ross, Alan Ruttenberg, Veronica Shamovsky, Barry Smith, Meher Shruti Yerramalla, Jian Zhang, Aisha AlJanahi, İrem Çelen, Cynthia Gan, Mengxi Lv, Emily Schuster-Lezell, Cathy Wu
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Abstract
The Protein Ontology (PRO; http://proconsortium.org) formally defines protein entities and explicitly represents their major forms and interrelations. Protein entities represented in PRO corresponding to single amino acid chains are categorized by level of specificity into family, gene, sequence and modification metaclasses, and there is a separate metaclass for protein complexes. All metaclasses also have organism-specific derivatives. PRO complements established sequence databases such as UniProtKB, and interoperates with other biomedical and biological ontologies such as the Gene Ontology (GO). PRO relates to UniProtKB in that PRO's organism-specific classes of proteins encoded by a specific gene correspond to entities documented in UniProtKB entries. PRO relates to the GO in that PRO's representations of organism-specific protein complexes are subclasses of the organism-agnostic protein complex terms in the GO Cellular Component Ontology. The past few years have seen growth and changes to the PRO, as well as new points of access to the data and new applications of PRO in immunology and proteomics. Here we describe some of these developments.
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