A roadmap for the functional annotation of protein families: a community perspective.

Over the last 25 years, biology has entered the genomic era and is becoming a science of 'big data'. Most interpretations of genomic analyses rely on accurate functional annotations of the proteins encoded by more than 500 000 genomes sequenced to date. By different estimates, only half the predicted sequenced proteins carry an accurate functional annotation, and this percentage varies drastically between different organismal lineages.

Interpreting the lipidome: bioinformatic approaches to embrace the complexity.

Background: Improvements in mass spectrometry (MS) technologies coupled with bioinformatics developments have allowed considerable advancement in the measurement and interpretation of lipidomics data in recent years. Since research areas employing lipidomics are rapidly increasing, there is a great need for bioinformatic tools that capture and utilize the complexity of the data. Currently, the diversity and complexity within the lipidome is often concealed by summing over or averaging individual lipids up to (sub)class-based descriptors, losing valuable information about biological function and interactions with other distinct lipids molecules, proteins and/or metabolites.

Navigating in vitro bioactivity data by investigating available resources using model compounds.

The number of chemical compounds and associated experimental data in public databases is growing, but presently there is no simple way to access these data in a quick and synoptic manner. Instead, data are fragmented across different resources and interested parties need to invest invaluable time and effort to navigate these systems.

InterPro in 2017-beyond protein family and domain annotations.

InterPro (http://www.ebi.ac.

UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, the Manually Annotated Section of the UniProt KnowledgeBase: How to Use the Entry View.

The Universal Protein Resource (UniProt, http://www.uniprot.org ) consortium is an initiative of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and the Protein Information Resource (PIR) to provide the scientific community with a central resource for protein sequences and functional information.

Extending the Schizosaccharomyces pombe molecular genetic toolbox.

Targeted alteration of the genome lies at the heart of the exploitation of S. pombe as a model system. The rate of analysis is often determined by the efficiency with which a target locus can be manipulated.

Suppression of the Schizosaccharomyces pombe cut12.1 cell-cycle defect by mutations in cdc25 and genes involved in transcriptional and translational control.

Cdc25 phosphatase primes entry to mitosis by removing the inhibitory phosphate that is transferred to mitosis promoting factor (MPF) by Wee1 related kinases. A positive feedback loop then boosts Cdc25 and represses Wee1 activities to drive full-scale MPF activation and commitment to mitosis. Dominant mutations in the Schizosaccharomyces pombe spindle pole body (SPB) component Cut12 enable cdc25.

Induction of an interferon response by RNAi vectors in mammalian cells.

DNA vectors that express short hairpin RNAs (shRNAs) from RNA polymerase III (Pol III) promoters are a promising new tool to reduce gene expression in mammalian cells. shRNAs are processed to small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) of 21 nucleotides (nt) that guide the cleavage of the cognate mRNA by the RNA-induced silencing complex. Although siRNAs are thought to be too short to induce interferon expression, we report here that a substantial number of shRNA vectors can trigger an interferon response.