title: Key challenges for the creation and maintenance of specialist protein resources.
abstract: As the volume of data relating to proteins increases, researchers rely more and more on the analysis of published data, thus increasing the importance of good access to these data that vary from the supplemental material of individual articles, all the way to major reference databases with professional staff and long-term funding. Specialist protein resources fill an important middle ground, providing interactive web interfaces to their databases for a focused topic or family of proteins, using specialized approaches that are not feasible in the major reference databases. Many are labors of love, run by a single lab with little or no dedicated funding and there are many challenges to building and maintaining them. This perspective arose from a meeting of several specialist protein resources and major reference databases held at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus (Cambridge, UK) on August 11 and 12, 2014. During this meeting some common key challenges involved in creating and maintaining such resources were discussed, along with various approaches to address them. In laying out these challenges, we aim to inform users about how these issues impact our resources and illustrate ways in which our working together could enhance their accuracy, currency, and overall value.
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, California, 94158.
authors.forename: Gemma L
authors.initials: GL
authors.lastname: Holliday
authors.affiliation: SIB-Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Amos
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bairoch
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics, University of Thessaly, Lamia, 35100, Greece.
authors.forename: Pantelis G
authors.initials: PG
authors.lastname: Bagos
authors.affiliation: INRA, Umr866 Dynamique Musculaire Et Métabolisme, Montpellier, F-34000, France.|Université Montpellier, Montpellier, F-34000, France.
authors.forename: Arnaud
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chatonnet
authors.affiliation: Institute for Molecular Bioscience. The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, 4072, Australia.
authors.forename: David J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Craik
authors.affiliation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, Cb10 1SD, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Robert D
authors.initials: RD
authors.lastname: Finn
authors.affiliation: Architecture Et Fonction Des Macromolécules Biologiques, CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université, Marseille, 13288, France.|Department of Biological Sciences, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
authors.forename: Bernard
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Henrissat
authors.affiliation: National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, 20892.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Landsman
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioinformatics & Computational Biology, Genentech, 1 DNA Way, South San Francisco, California, 98010.
authors.forename: Gerard
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Manning
authors.affiliation: Computational Biology Research Center, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tokyo, 135-0064, Japan.
authors.forename: Nozomi
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Nagano
authors.affiliation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, Cb10 1SD, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Claire
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: O'Donovan
authors.affiliation: National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, 20892.
authors.forename: Kim D
authors.initials: KD
authors.lastname: Pruitt
authors.affiliation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, Cb10 1SD, United Kingdom.|Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, Cb10 1SD, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Neil D
authors.initials: ND
authors.lastname: Rawlings
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular Biology, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California, 92093.
authors.forename: Milton
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Saier
authors.affiliation: National Centre for Biological Sciences, TIFR, GKVK Campus, Bellary Road, Bangalore, 560065, India.
authors.forename: Ramanathan
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Sowdhamini
authors.affiliation: Chair NC-IUPHAR, Spedding Research Solutions SARL, 6 Rue Ampere, Le Vesinet, 78110, France.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Spedding
authors.affiliation: Molecular Biophysics Unit, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, 560012, India.
authors.forename: Narayanaswamy
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Srinivasan
authors.affiliation: Centre for Molecular and Biomolecular Informatics (CMBI), Radboud University Medical Center, Geert Grooteplein Zuid 26-28, 6525 GA, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Gert
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Vriend
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, California, 94158.
authors.forename: Patricia C
authors.initials: PC
authors.lastname: Babbitt
authors.affiliation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, Cb10 1SD, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Alex
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bateman
mesh_terms: D066289:Data Curation; D030562:Databases, Protein / Q000592:standards*; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D011506:Proteins
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins
keywords: big data; biocuration; key challenges; longevity; misannotation; specialist protein resource
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