When manual curation databases, such as PharmGKB (2) and the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) (3), were developed, the biocurators used PubMed and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) to understand and annotate medical terms.
A major bottleneck for these databases is manual curation of the data.
Several value-added databases invest manual curation effort to enrich metadata information for gene-expression studies.
Despite the standards prescribed and adhered to by the source databases, extensive manual curation was required to remove inconsistent interaction type or experimental method descriptions for the same Pubmed ID across multiple databases.
Because such detailed annotations describing dynamic characterisations of proteins are rarely available in large public databases, extensive manual curation of the nucleolus literature was required to create the datasets for this study.
UniProt is a major contributor to the GO (22), a major bioinformatics initiative that aims to standardize the representation of gene and gene product attributes across species and databases, and manual curation of GO terms based on experimental data from the literature is part of the UniProt curation process.
This comparison also shows that depending on the requirements, a user can select any of the databases for manual pathway curation, and the application developers can also use this information to create software for efficient and fast data curation from different sources.
The criteria to generate such confidence scores vary from database to database; some evaluate the confidence by manual expert curation, whereas others use a detailed scoring system.
Manual curation of the database was carried out using a series of tools for identification and annotation of genes and protein functions, literature mining and a combination of published (25) and unpublished RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) data.
