PaperBLAST – Find papers about a protein or its homologs

 

PaperBLAST

PaperBLAST Hits for Shewana3_0683 (83 a.a., MECSLIEQIL...)

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 39 similar proteins in the literature:

IbaG / b3190 acid stress protein IbaG from Escherichia coli K-12 substr. MG1655 (see 6 papers)
IBAG_ECOLI / P0A9W6 Acid stress protein IbaG from Escherichia coli (strain K12) (see paper)
b3190 orf, hypothetical protein from Escherichia coli str. K-12 substr. MG1655
NP_417657 acid stress protein IbaG from Escherichia coli str. K-12 substr. MG1655
57% identity, 99% coverage

ECs4069 hypothetical protein from Escherichia coli O157:H7 str. Sakai
57% identity, 93% coverage

SL1344_3280 BolA family iron metabolism protein IbaG from Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Typhimurium str. SL1344
57% identity, 99% coverage

PMI3660 morphoprotein from Proteus mirabilis HI4320
58% identity, 94% coverage

M892_12930 BolA family iron metabolism protein IbaG from Vibrio campbellii ATCC BAA-1116
57% identity, 94% coverage

YPTB3514 putative BolA/YrbA family protein from Yersinia pseudotuberculosis IP 32953
54% identity, 95% coverage

YPO3570 BolA-like protein from Yersinia pestis CO92
53% identity, 95% coverage

WP_000376481 BolA family iron metabolism protein IbaG from Vibrio cholerae O1 str. 2011EL-1137
57% identity, 94% coverage

VP2659 BolA/YrbA family protein from Vibrio parahaemolyticus RIMD 2210633
53% identity, 99% coverage

P45026 Uncharacterized protein HI_1082 from Haemophilus influenzae (strain ATCC 51907 / DSM 11121 / KW20 / Rd)
HI1082 conserved hypothetical protein from Haemophilus influenzae Rd KW20
54% identity, 96% coverage

HD0254 conserved hypothetical protein from Haemophilus ducreyi 35000HP
49% identity, 95% coverage

Bfl045 conserved hypothetical protein from Candidatus Blochmannia floridanus
36% identity, 90% coverage

BU385 hypothetical protein from Buchnera aphidicola str. APS (Acyrthosiphon pisum)
40% identity, 76% coverage

bolA / CAB45536.1 BolA protein from Pseudomonas fluorescens (see paper)
42% identity, 61% coverage

lpg0846 hypothetical BolA like protein from Legionella pneumophila subsp. pneumophila str. Philadelphia 1
37% identity, 88% coverage

C0J56_08545 BolA family protein from Pseudomonas fluorescens
42% identity, 61% coverage

ssr3122 hypothetical protein from Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803
47% identity, 60% coverage

PA0857 morphogene protein BolA from Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1
42% identity, 64% coverage

Bd1328 BolA-like protein from Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus HD100
39% identity, 67% coverage

PP0963 toluene-tolerance protein from Pseudomonas putida KT2440
33% identity, 90% coverage

PP1757 bolA protein from Pseudomonas putida KT2440
41% identity, 63% coverage

PA4451 hypothetical protein from Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1
31% identity, 90% coverage

JUK32_RS25875 BolA family protein from Halomicronema sp. CCY15110
42% identity, 62% coverage

Rta_08200 BolA family protein from Ramlibacter tataouinensis TTB310
28% identity, 90% coverage

BPSL3142 BolA-like protein from Burkholderia pseudomallei K96243
32% identity, 88% coverage

ABA1_00155 BolA family protein from Acinetobacter baumannii
34% identity, 75% coverage

C0J56_05010 BolA family protein from Pseudomonas fluorescens
31% identity, 90% coverage

Synpcc7942_1146 conserved hypothetical protein from Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942
35% identity, 65% coverage

Saro_2520 BolA-like protein from Novosphingobium aromaticivorans DSM 12444
38% identity, 88% coverage

PSPTO_4442 toluene tolerance protein, putative from Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato str. DC3000
31% identity, 90% coverage

VT47_19750 BolA family protein from Pseudomonas syringae pv. syringae
31% identity, 90% coverage

VF_0724 transcriptional regulator BolA from Aliivibrio fischeri ES114
VF_0724 regulator of penicillin binding proteins and beta lactamase transcription (morphogene) from Vibrio fischeri ES114
40% identity, 68% coverage

RSP_2952 BolA-like protein from Rhodobacter sphaeroides 2.4.1
34% identity, 87% coverage

NGO1657 hypothetical protein from Neisseria gonorrhoeae FA 1090
33% identity, 60% coverage

BAB1_0856 ATP/GTP-binding site motif A (P-loop):BolA-like protein from Brucella melitensis biovar Abortus 2308
35% identity, 87% coverage

3tr3B / Q83DW0 Structure of a bola protein homologue from coxiella burnetii (see paper)
31% identity, 71% coverage

NMB0344 BolA/YrbA family protein from Neisseria meningitidis MC58
33% identity, 60% coverage

HVO_2899 hypothetical protein from Haloferax volcanii DS2
32% identity, 83% coverage

asr0798 hypothetical protein from Nostoc sp. PCC 7120
31% identity, 81% 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