PaperBLAST – Find papers about a protein or its homologs

 

PaperBLAST

PaperBLAST Hits for SM_b21330 (69 a.a., MDWNRVEGNW...)

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:

SM2011_RS11135 CsbD family protein from Sinorhizobium meliloti 2011
100% identity, 100% coverage

RL2307 hypothetical protein from Rhizobium leguminosarum bv. viciae 3841
91% identity, 97% coverage

NGR_RS22185 CsbD family protein from Sinorhizobium fredii NGR234
87% identity, 99% coverage

MAFF_RS37185 CsbD family protein from Mesorhizobium japonicum MAFF 303099
88% identity, 97% coverage

bsl1473 bsl1473 from Bradyrhizobium japonicum USDA 110
71% identity, 90% coverage

BN69_2599 CsbD family protein from Methylocystis sp. SC2
J7QV15 CsbD family protein from Methylocystis sp. (strain SC2)
60% identity, 94% coverage

KPN_04433 hypothetical protein from Klebsiella pneumoniae subsp. pneumoniae MGH 78578
57% identity, 80% coverage

KQQSB11_50044 CsbD family protein from Klebsiella quasipneumoniae subsp. quasipneumoniae
57% identity, 100% coverage

YjbJ / b4045 putative stress response protein YjbJ from Escherichia coli K-12 substr. MG1655 (see 9 papers)
yjbJ / RF|NP_418469 UPF0337 protein yjbJ from Escherichia coli K12 (see paper)
EDL933_5382, EDL933_RS26675 CsbD family protein from Escherichia coli O157:H7 str. EDL933
NP_418469 putative stress response protein YjbJ from Escherichia coli str. K-12 substr. MG1655
P68206 UPF0337 protein YjbJ from Escherichia coli (strain K12)
b4045 predicted stress response protein from Escherichia coli str. K-12 substr. MG1655
ECs5028 hypothetical protein from Escherichia coli O157:H7 str. Sakai
58% identity, 100% coverage

STY4436 conserved hypothetical protein from Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Typhi str. CT18
STM4240 putative cytoplasmic protein from Salmonella typhimurium LT2
57% identity, 99% coverage

STM14_5097 CsbD family protein from Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Typhimurium str. 14028S
57% identity, 100% coverage

OA04_05950 CsbD family protein from Pectobacterium versatile
52% identity, 100% coverage

PMI0360 general stress response protein from Proteus mirabilis HI4320
50% identity, 94% coverage

BCAM0504 CsbD-like protein from Burkholderia cenocepacia J2315
49% identity, 88% coverage

BP1738 conserved hypothetical protein from Bordetella pertussis Tohama I
45% identity, 93% coverage

PA14_62680 hypothetical protein from Pseudomonas aeruginosa UCBPP-PA14
Q9HV61 UPF0337 protein PA4738 from Pseudomonas aeruginosa (strain ATCC 15692 / DSM 22644 / CIP 104116 / JCM 14847 / LMG 12228 / 1C / PRS 101 / PAO1)
PA4738 hypothetical protein from Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1
48% identity, 93% coverage

XAC4007 conserved hypothetical protein from Xanthomonas axonopodis pv. citri str. 306
E2P69_RS15800 CsbD family protein from Xanthomonas perforans
45% identity, 84% coverage

BCAM0507 CsbD-like protein from Burkholderia cenocepacia J2315
52% identity, 81% coverage

XAC0100 conserved hypothetical protein from Xanthomonas axonopodis pv. citri str. 306
45% identity, 80% 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