Paul Thomas of the University of Southern California, along with colleagues from the US and Switzerland, and the international Gene Ontology Consortium, have presented the most comprehensive electronic catalog of human gene functions (the functionalome) to date. It was created using experimental data from over 175,000 studies, integrating expert-guided evolutionary modeling to reconstruct the gains and losses of functional gene characteristics during evolution. The project is described in the journal Nature.
In its current form, the catalog contains annotations of 68,667 functions from 17,079 human protein-coding genes, representing 81.9 percent of the total number in the UniProt database. Thirty-eight percent of the functions were directly confirmed, while the remaining 62 percent were inferred from homology data trees. All experimental confirmations of functional characteristics are listed in their descriptions. The resulting database is publicly available.
