title: Ontologies for proteomics: towards a systematic definition of structure and function that scales to the genome level.
abstract: A principal aim of post-genomic biology is elucidating the structures, functions and biochemical properties of all gene products in a genome. However, to adequately comprehend such a large amount of information we need new descriptions of proteins that scale to the genomic level. In short, we need a unified ontology for proteomics. Much progress has been made towards this end, including a variety of approaches to systematic structural and functional classification and initial work towards developing standardized, unified descriptions for protein properties. In relation to function, there is a particularly great diversity of approaches, involving placing a protein in structured hierarchies or more-generalized networks and a recent approach based on circumscribing a protein's function through systematic enumeration of molecular interactions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular Biophysics, New Haven, CT 06520, USA. lan@bioinfo.mbb.yale.edu
authors.forename: Ning
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Lan
authors.forename: Gaetano T
authors.initials: GT
authors.lastname: Montelione
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gerstein
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology; D030562:Databases, Protein; D005796:Genes; D016678:Genome; D019451:Information Management; D011506:Proteins / Q000145:classification*; D040901:Proteomics
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins