The PIR for Functional Genomics and Proteomics

The human genome project has revolutionized the practice of biology and the future potential of medicine. Complete genomes continue to be sequenced en masse . Meanwhile, there is growing recognition that proteomic studies bring the researcher closer to the actual biology than studies of gene sequence or gene expression alone. High-throughput studies are being conducted and rapid advances being made in areas such as protein expression, protein structure and function, and protein-protein interactions. Given the enormous increase in genomic, proteomic, and molecular data, computational approaches, in combination with empirical methods, are expected to become essential for deriving and evaluating hypotheses. To fully explore these valuable data, advanced bioinformatics infrastructures must be developed for biological knowledge management. One major challenge lies in the volume, complexity, and dynamic nature of the data, which are being collected and maintained in heterogeneous and distributed sources. New approaches need to be devised for data collection, maintenance, dissemination, query, and analysis. The Protein Information Resource (PIR) aims to serve as an integrated public resource of functional annotation of proteins to support genomic/proteomic research and scientific discovery. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.