Paul Thomas from the University of Southern California with colleagues from the USA and Switzerland and the international consortium Gene Ontology Consortium presented the most complete electronic catalog of human gene functions (the funcome) to date. To create it, they used experimental data from more than 175,000 studies that integrated evolutionary modeling under the supervision of experts, which made it possible to reconstruct the gain and loss of functional characteristics of genes during evolution. The process of working on the project is described in the journal Nature.
In its current form, the catalog contains annotations of 68,667 functions of 17,079 human protein-coding genes, which is 81.9 percent of the total number according to the UniProt database. 38 percent of the functions were confirmed directly, the remaining 62 percent were inferred from homology data trees. All experimental confirmations of functional characteristics are indicated in their descriptions. The resulting database is publicly available.