Annotation of Entirely Sequenced Genomes

All the computational tasks initiated in this project began with running a battery of sequence analysis and protein structure and function prediction programs for entirely sequenced organisms. We started with a set of 45,000 proteins of particular biological interest; next, we will select a few representative eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms (about 100) with about 500,000 proteins in total. We pursue two important research objectives by this project. The first is related to the selection of targets for large-scale structural genomics. Structural genomics is an initiative that attempts to experimentally determine high-resolution structures of proteins for which we today have no experimental and little or no in silico evidence about structure. The second scientific objective pertains to the study of proteins that have a particular structural feature, namely that they are natively unstructured, i.e. adopt regular three-dimensional structures only upon folding to substrates. Such proteins are particularly abundant in higher eukaryotes. In fact, the abundance of these proteins in higher eukaryotes is, aside from alternative splicing and the number of proteins, the most dramatic difference of the proteomes of higher eukaryotes and of simple bacteria. All data generated will be made publicly available via - in addition to other channels - a new automatic tagging system named Reflect.