PaperBLAST – Find papers about a protein or its homologs

 

PaperBLAST

PaperBLAST Hits for MMP_RS06755 (52 a.a., MEILDKCVGC...)

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 25 similar proteins in the literature:

Cphy_2056 hydrogenase, Fe-only from Clostridium phytofermentans ISDg
40% identity, 8% coverage

B2M23_RS02975 DUF362 domain-containing protein from Eubacterium limosum
47% identity, 88% coverage

P14073 Ferredoxin from Butyribacterium methylotrophicum
46% identity, 91% coverage

AF0355 ferredoxin (fdx-3) from Archaeoglobus fulgidus DSM 4304
53% identity, 65% coverage

D9PW01 Polyferredoxin from Methanothermobacter marburgensis (strain ATCC BAA-927 / DSM 2133 / JCM 14651 / NBRC 100331 / OCM 82 / Marburg)
41% identity, 20% coverage

hymB / GI|14250934 protein HymB from Eubacterium acidaminophilum (see paper)
50% identity, 8% coverage

TON_0957 3'-phosphoadenosine 5'-phosphosulfate reductase from Thermococcus onnurineus NA1
44% identity, 7% coverage

AHA_1496 pyridine nucleotide-disulphide oxidoreductase family protein from Aeromonas hydrophila subsp. hydrophila ATCC 7966
A0KID3 Pyridine nucleotide-disulphide oxidoreductase family protein from Aeromonas hydrophila subsp. hydrophila (strain ATCC 7966 / DSM 30187 / BCRC 13018 / CCUG 14551 / JCM 1027 / KCTC 2358 / NCIMB 9240 / NCTC 8049)
43% identity, 8% coverage

MCP_0638 putative phosphoadenosine phosphosulfate reductase from Methanocella paludicola SANAE
46% identity, 6% coverage

SWOL_RS10890 4Fe-4S binding protein from Syntrophomonas wolfei subsp. wolfei str. Goettingen G311
52% identity, 81% coverage

GSU2708 ferredoxin family protein from Geobacter sulfurreducens PCA
48% identity, 88% coverage

CD1142 electron transport complex protein from Clostridium difficile 630
47% identity, 14% coverage

CD630_31210 EFR1 family ferrodoxin from Clostridioides difficile 630
CD3121 putative flavodoxin from Clostridium difficile 630
41% identity, 18% coverage

CTK_C26290 4Fe-4S dicluster domain-containing protein from Clostridium tyrobutyricum
45% identity, 10% coverage

CIBE_4899 glycyl-radical enzyme activating protein from Clostridium beijerinckii
39% identity, 14% coverage

MMP1692 polyferredoxin, associated with F420-non-reducing hydrogenase from Methanococcus maripaludis S2
50% identity, 13% coverage

TKV_c09620 indolepyruvate ferredoxin oxidoreductase subunit alpha from Thermoanaerobacter kivui
42% identity, 86% coverage

CD630_11420, CDIF630erm_01289 RnfABCDGE type electron transport complex subunit B from Clostridioides difficile
47% identity, 15% coverage

Gmet_1033 4Fe-4S ferredoxin, iron-sulfur binding protein from Geobacter metallireducens GS-15
48% identity, 66% coverage

TK0290 pyruvate-formate lyase-activating enzyme from Thermococcus kodakaraensis KOD1
44% identity, 15% coverage

Q9P9E6 pyruvate synthase (subunit 3/5) (EC 1.2.7.1) from Methanococcus maripaludis (see paper)
48% identity, 55% coverage

PIN17_RS06895, PIOMA14_I_1049, PIOMA14_RS05315 4Fe-4S binding protein from Prevotella intermedia
45% identity, 89% coverage

MMP1506 pyruvate oxidoreductase (synthase) subunit delta from Methanococcus maripaludis S2
48% identity, 55% coverage

Halsa_1863 NADH-quinone oxidoreductase subunit NuoF from Halanaerobium hydrogeniformans
46% identity, 8% coverage

MMP0824 coenzyme F420-non-reducing hydrogenase subunit beta from Methanococcus maripaludis S2
43% identity, 13% 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