Modern genome annotation: The BioSapiens network

In order to maximise our understanding of biology and evolution, gained from the large scale sequencing projects of the current era, it is necessary to be able to assign detailed biochemical, cellular and developmental functions to as many protein sequences as possible. More than five million distinct proteins can be found in the major public repositories, i.e., UniProt & RefSeq (Pruitt et al. 2007; UniProt Consortium 2007), but detailed laboratory investigations have only been carried out for a tiny fraction. For instance, only ~ 25,000 proteins have solved structures in the international protein structure repository, the worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB, Berman et al. 2003)