PaperBLAST – Find papers about a protein or its homologs

 

PaperBLAST

PaperBLAST Hits for 85 a.a. (MLSFLVSLVV...)

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 24 similar proteins in the literature:

lp_0926 integral membrane protein from Lactobacillus plantarum WCFS1
56% identity, 99% coverage

SAR0392 putative membrane protein from Staphylococcus aureus subsp. aureus MRSA252
46% identity, 99% coverage

SAOUHSC_00358 hypothetical protein from Staphylococcus aureus subsp. aureus NCTC 8325
SA0360 hypothetical protein from Staphylococcus aureus subsp. aureus N315
SAV0374 hypothetical protein from Staphylococcus aureus subsp. aureus Mu50
SAUSA300_0374 hypothetical protein from Staphylococcus aureus subsp. aureus USA300_FPR3757
NWMN_0366 hypothetical protein from Staphylococcus aureus subsp. aureus str. Newman
USA300HOU_0397 hypothetical membrane protein from Staphylococcus aureus subsp. aureus USA300_TCH1516
46% identity, 98% coverage

DV527_RS10290 GlsB/YeaQ/YmgE family stress response membrane protein from Staphylococcus saprophyticus
47% identity, 98% coverage

DMB76_011110 GlsB/YeaQ/YmgE family stress response membrane protein from Staphylococcus saccharolyticus
48% identity, 74% coverage

LSA0166 Hypothetical Integral membrane protein from Lactobacillus sakei subsp. sakei 23K
47% identity, 75% coverage

BC1000 hypothetical Membrane Spanning Protein from Bacillus cereus ATCC 14579
39% identity, 96% coverage

EF0081 membrane protein, putative from Enterococcus faecalis V583
49% identity, 91% coverage

LBA0872 hypothetical protein from Lactobacillus acidophilus NCFM
44% identity, 98% coverage

SPy1768 conserved hypothetical protein from Streptococcus pyogenes M1 GAS
47% identity, 85% coverage

EF2708 membran protein, putative from Enterococcus faecalis V583
42% identity, 92% coverage

SP_0279 hypothetical protein from Streptococcus pneumoniae TIGR4
48% identity, 74% coverage

LLKF_0277 hypothetical protein from Lactococcus lactis subsp. lactis KF147
50% identity, 68% coverage

AWJ25_RS06350 GlsB/YeaQ/YmgE family stress response membrane protein from Enterococcus faecium
49% identity, 62% coverage

BAS2692 conserved hypothetical protein from Bacillus anthracis str. Sterne
AW20_5555 GlsB/YeaQ/YmgE family stress response membrane protein from Bacillus anthracis str. Sterne
48% identity, 91% coverage

SPy1265 conserved hypothetical protein from Streptococcus pyogenes M1 GAS
M6_Spy0965 Integral membrane protein from Streptococcus pyogenes MGAS10394
36% identity, 91% coverage

L67002 HYPOTHETICAL PROTEIN from Lactococcus lactis subsp. lactis Il1403
49% identity, 67% coverage

LSEI_2880 Predicted membrane protein from Lactobacillus casei ATCC 334
54% identity, 66% coverage

llmg_1257 hypothetical protein from Lactococcus lactis subsp. cremoris MG1363
LLKF_2284 hypothetical protein from Lactococcus lactis subsp. lactis KF147
49% identity, 67% coverage

UC7_RS15700 GlsB/YeaQ/YmgE family stress response membrane protein from Enterococcus caccae ATCC BAA-1240
47% identity, 82% coverage

SP_1801 hypothetical protein from Streptococcus pneumoniae TIGR4
53% identity, 51% coverage

LLKF_2085 hypothetical protein from Lactococcus lactis subsp. lactis KF147
46% identity, 67% coverage

M5005_Spy_0976 integral membrane protein from Streptococcus pyogenes MGAS5005
44% identity, 56% coverage

lp_3577 integral membrane protein from Lactobacillus plantarum WCFS1
50% identity, 48% 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 798,070 different protein sequences to 1,261,478 scientific articles. Searches against EuropePMC were last performed on May 12 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