Genome sequences and great expectations

Ioannis Iliopoulos¹, Sophia Tsoka¹, Miguel A Andrade², Paul Janssen¹, Benjamin Audit¹, Anna Tramontano³, Alfonso Valencia⁴, Christophe Leroy⁵, Chris Sander⁵ and Christos A Ouzounis¹

¹Computational Genomics Group, Research Programme, The European Bioinformatics Institute, EMBL Cambridge Outstation, Cambridge, CB10 1SD, UK

²Biological Structures and BioComputing Programme, EMBL, Meyerhofstrasse 1, Heidelberg, Germany

³Department of Computational Biology and Chemistry, IRBM, Via Pontina, Pomezia, Rome, Italy

⁴Protein Design Group, National Center for Biotechnology, Cantoblanco, Madrid, Spain

⁵MIT Center for Genome Research, One Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA

author email corresponding author email

Genome Biology 2000, 2:interactions0001.1-0001.3doi:10.1186/gb-2000-2-1-interactions0001


Published:	29 December 2000

Subject areas: Genome studies, Bioinformatics, Model organisms, Microbiology and parasitology

Abstract

To assess how automatic function assignment will contribute to genome annotation in the next five years, we have performed an analysis of 31 available genome sequences. An emerging pattern is that function can be predicted for almost two-thirds of the 73,500 genes that were analyzed. Despite progress in computational biology, there will always be a great need for large-scale experimental determination of protein function.