PaperBLAST – Find papers about a protein or its homologs

 

PaperBLAST

PaperBLAST Hits for sp|P29364|KHSE_PSEAE Homoserine kinase OS=Pseudomonas aeruginosa (strain ATCC 15692 / DSM 22644 / CIP 104116 / JCM 14847 / LMG 12228 / 1C / PRS 101 / PAO1) OX=208964 GN=thrB PE=3 SV=2 (316 a.a., MSVFTPLERS...)

Other sequence analysis tools:

Find functional residues: SitesBLAST

Search for conserved domains

Find the best match in UniProt

Compare to protein structures

Predict transmenbrane helices: Phobius

Predict protein localization: PSORTb

Find homologs in fast.genomics

Fitness BLAST: loading...

Found 19 similar proteins in the literature:

KHSE_PSEAE / P29364 Homoserine kinase; HK; HSK; EC 2.7.1.39 from Pseudomonas aeruginosa (strain ATCC 15692 / DSM 22644 / CIP 104116 / JCM 14847 / LMG 12228 / 1C / PRS 101 / PAO1) (see paper)
PA5495 homoserine kinase from Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1
100% identity, 100% coverage

Q02DL4 Homoserine kinase from Pseudomonas aeruginosa (strain UCBPP-PA14)
99% identity, 100% coverage

CPH89_RS10590 homoserine kinase from Pseudomonas fluorescens
74% identity, 100% coverage

PP0121 homoserine kinase from Pseudomonas putida KT2440
71% identity, 100% coverage

thrB / AAF21132.1 homoserine kinase from Methylobacillus flagellatus (see paper)
43% identity, 94% coverage

BCAM0899 putative homoserine kinase from Burkholderia cenocepacia J2315
43% identity, 92% coverage

NGO2075 ThrB from Neisseria gonorrhoeae FA 1090
40% identity, 94% coverage

NGK_2537 homoserine kinase from Neisseria gonorrhoeae NCCP11945
40% identity, 94% coverage

A9HS91 Homoserine kinase from Gluconacetobacter diazotrophicus (strain ATCC 49037 / DSM 5601 / CCUG 37298 / CIP 103539 / LMG 7603 / PAl5)
41% identity, 94% coverage

CC3364 homoserine kinase from Caulobacter crescentus CB15
CCNA_03475 homoserine kinase from Caulobacter crescentus NA1000
40% identity, 96% coverage

BAB1_0502 Aminoglycoside phosphotransferase:Homoserine kinase ThrB from Brucella melitensis biovar Abortus 2308
37% identity, 97% coverage

BMEI1458 HOMOSERINE KINASE from Brucella melitensis 16M
37% identity, 97% coverage

RPA4270 homoserine kinase from Rhodopseudomonas palustris CGA009
38% identity, 94% coverage

Ga0059261_3253 homoserine kinase (EC 2.7.1.39) from Sphingomonas koreensis DSMZ 15582
38% identity, 87% coverage

Rru_A3053 Homoserine kinase ThrB from Rhodospirillum rubrum ATCC 11170
38% identity, 96% coverage

ZMO1600 homoserine kinase from Zymomonas mobilis subsp. mobilis ZM4
37% identity, 87% coverage

ABO_0042 phosphotransferase family protein from Alcanivorax borkumensis SK2
36% identity, 97% coverage

A1S_3244 homoserine kinase from Acinetobacter baumannii ATCC 17978
33% identity, 87% coverage

HMPREF0421_20507, WP_009993807 phosphotransferase enzyme family protein from Gardnerella vaginalis ATCC 14019
31% identity, 31% coverage

New Search

For advice on how to use these tools together, see Interactive tools for functional annotation of bacterial genomes.

Statistics

The PaperBLAST database links 793,807 different protein sequences to 1,259,118 scientific articles. Searches against EuropePMC were last performed on March 13 2025.

How It Works

PaperBLAST builds a database of protein sequences that are linked to scientific articles. These links come from automated text searches against the articles in EuropePMC and from manually-curated information from GeneRIF, UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, BRENDA, CAZy (as made available by dbCAN), BioLiP, CharProtDB, MetaCyc, EcoCyc, TCDB, REBASE, the Fitness Browser, and a subset of the European Nucleotide Archive with the /experiment tag. Given this database and a protein sequence query, PaperBLAST uses protein-protein BLAST to find similar sequences with E < 0.001.

To build the database, we query EuropePMC with locus tags, with RefSeq protein identifiers, and with UniProt accessions. We obtain the locus tags from RefSeq or from MicrobesOnline. We use queries of the form "locus_tag AND genus_name" to try to ensure that the paper is actually discussing that gene. Because EuropePMC indexes most recent biomedical papers, even if they are not open access, some of the links may be to papers that you cannot read or that our computers cannot read. We query each of these identifiers that appears in the open access part of EuropePMC, as well as every locus tag that appears in the 500 most-referenced genomes, so that a gene may appear in the PaperBLAST results even though none of the papers that mention it are open access. We also incorporate text-mined links from EuropePMC that link open access articles to UniProt or RefSeq identifiers. (This yields some additional links because EuropePMC uses different heuristics for their text mining than we do.)

For every article that mentions a locus tag, a RefSeq protein identifier, or a UniProt accession, we try to select one or two snippets of text that refer to the protein. If we cannot get access to the full text, we try to select a snippet from the abstract, but unfortunately, unique identifiers such as locus tags are rarely provided in abstracts.

PaperBLAST also incorporates manually-curated protein functions:

Except for GeneRIF and ENA, the curated entries include a short curated description of the protein's function. For entries from BioLiP, the protein's function may not be known beyond binding to the ligand. Many of these entries also link to articles in PubMed.

For more information see the PaperBLAST paper (mSystems 2017) or the code. You can download PaperBLAST's database here.

Changes to PaperBLAST since the paper was written:

Many of these changes are described in Interactive tools for functional annotation of bacterial genomes.

Secrets

PaperBLAST cannot provide snippets for many of the papers that are published in non-open-access journals. This limitation applies even if the paper is marked as "free" on the publisher's web site and is available in PubmedCentral or EuropePMC. If a journal that you publish in is marked as "secret," please consider publishing elsewhere.

Omissions from the PaperBLAST Database

Many important articles are missing from PaperBLAST, either because the article's full text is not in EuropePMC (as for many older articles), or because the paper does not mention a protein identifier such as a locus tag, or because of PaperBLAST's heuristics. If you notice an article that characterizes a protein's function but is missing from PaperBLAST, please notify the curators at UniProt or add an entry to GeneRIF. Entries in either of these databases will eventually be incorporated into PaperBLAST. Note that to add an entry to UniProt, you will need to find the UniProt identifier for the protein. If the protein is not already in UniProt, you can ask them to create an entry. To add an entry to GeneRIF, you will need an NCBI Gene identifier, but unfortunately many prokaryotic proteins in RefSeq do not have corresponding Gene identifers.

References

PaperBLAST: Text-mining papers for information about homologs.
M. N. Price and A. P. Arkin (2017). mSystems, 10.1128/mSystems.00039-17.

Europe PMC in 2017.
M. Levchenko et al (2017). Nucleic Acids Research, 10.1093/nar/gkx1005.

Gene indexing: characterization and analysis of NLM's GeneRIFs.
J. A. Mitchell et al (2003). AMIA Annu Symp Proc 2003:460-464.

UniProt: the universal protein knowledgebase.
The UniProt Consortium (2016). Nucleic Acids Research, 10.1093/nar/gkw1099.

BRENDA in 2017: new perspectives and new tools in BRENDA.
S. Placzek et al (2017). Nucleic Acids Research, 10.1093/nar/gkw952.

The EcoCyc database: reflecting new knowledge about Escherichia coli K-12.
I. M. Keeseler et al (2016). Nucleic Acids Research, 10.1093/nar/gkw1003.

The MetaCyc database of metabolic pathways and enzymes.
R. Caspi et al (2018). Nucleic Acids Research, 10.1093/nar/gkx935.

CharProtDB: a database of experimentally characterized protein annotations.
R. Madupu et al (2012). Nucleic Acids Research, 10.1093/nar/gkr1133.

The carbohydrate-active enzymes database (CAZy) in 2013.
V. Lombard et al (2014). Nucleic Acids Research, 10.1093/nar/gkt1178.

The Transporter Classification Database (TCDB): recent advances
M. H. Saier, Jr. et al (2016). Nucleic Acids Research, 10.1093/nar/gkv1103.

REBASE - a database for DNA restriction and modification: enzymes, genes and genomes.
R. J. Roberts et al (2015). Nucleic Acids Research, 10.1093/nar/gku1046.

Deep annotation of protein function across diverse bacteria from mutant phenotypes.
M. N. Price et al (2016). bioRxiv, 10.1101/072470.

by Morgan Price, Arkin group
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory