Journal Article

The COMBREX Project: Design, Methodology, and Initial Results

Setterdahl, Aaron, Segrè, Daniel, Letovsky, Stanley, Ferrer, Manuel, Macelis, Dana, Hu, Jie, Greiner, Russell, DeLisi, Charles, Maksad, Almaz, Tao, Kevin, Rudd, Kenneth E, Ruch, Patrick, Mazumdar, Varun, Gobeill, Julien, Roberts, Richard J, Rochussen, Krista, Blumenthal, Robert M, Galperin, Michael Y, Horn, David, Plata, Germán, Sjölander, Kimmen, Gadda, Giovanni, Haft, Daniel, Tchigvintsev, Dmitri, Salzberg, Steven L, McGettrick, Mark, Chang, Yi-Chien, Crécy-Lagard, Valérie de, Martin, Maria J, Ferguson, Donald, Madupu, Ramana, Columbus, Linda, Brenner, Steven E, Vitkup, Dennis, Osterman, Andrei L, Klitgord, Niels, Tate, John, Allen, Benjamin, Yakunin, Alexander, Söll, Dieter, Sutton, Granger, Rachlin, John, Monahan, Caitlin, Karp, Peter, Klimke, William, Rodionov, Dmitry A, Bhagwat, Ashok S, Hu, Zhenjun, Spain, James, Chang, Woo-Suk, Miller, Jeffrey H, Friedberg, Iddo, Kasif, Simon, Guleria, Jyotsna, Bollinger, J Martin, Anton, Brian P, Faller, Lina L, Swaminathan, Rajeswari, Xu, Shuang-yong, Osmani, Lais, Hunt, John, Rodionova, Irina A, Morgan, Richard D, Bateman, Alex, Pokrzywa, Revonda, Brown, Peter, Palsson,

2013

Overview

[...]that DNA sequencing has become orders of magnitude faster and less expensive, focus has shifted to sequencing entire genomes. Since biochemistry and genetics have not, by and large, enjoyed the same improvement of scale, public sequence repositories now predominantly contain putative protein sequences for which there is no direct experimental evidence of function. COMBREX (COMputational BRidges to EXperiments, http://combrex.bu.edu) is an NIH-funded enterprise that has brought computational and experimental biologists together, with the goal of greatly improving our overall understanding of microbial protein function [1],[2]. Since its inception, it has made significant progress toward the following goals: identifying the minority of proteins that have already been experimentally characterized, serving as a public repository of novel protein function predictions made by diverse methods, producing a clear chain of evidence from experiment to prediction, identifying (\"recommending\") those functional predictions whose verification will contribute most to our overall understanding of protein function, and actually funding the experiments to test function. [...]the project issues small monetary awards (COMBREX grants) to biologists to fund the experimental testing of such predictions.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science
• Subject: Biologists / Biology / Experiments / Genetics / Genomes / Proteins / Studies