PaperBLAST – Find papers about a protein or its homologs

 

PaperBLAST

PaperBLAST Hits for SwissProt::O32332 PTS system glucitol/sorbitol-specific EIIC component; EIIC-Gut; Glucitol/sorbitol permease IIC component (Clostridium beijerinckii (strain ATCC 51743 / NCIMB 8052) (Clostridium acetobutylicum)) (182 a.a., MDAIVYFAKG...)

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 15 similar proteins in the literature:

PTHC_CLOB8 / O32332 PTS system glucitol/sorbitol-specific EIIC component; EIIC-Gut; Glucitol/sorbitol permease IIC component from Clostridium beijerinckii (strain ATCC 51743 / NCIMB 8052) (Clostridium acetobutylicum) (see paper)
TC 4.A.4.1.2 / O32332 Glucitol/sorbitol permease IIC component, component of The Glucitol Enzyme II complex, IICBC (GutA1A2) IIA (GutB) from Clostridium beijerinckii (strain ATCC 51743 / NCIMB 8052) (see paper)
gutA1 / CAA05513.1 GutA1 from Clostridium beijerinckii (see paper)
Cbei_0336 PTS system, glucitol/sorbitol-specific, IIC subunit from Clostridium beijerincki NCIMB 8052
100% identity, 100% coverage

SPSF3K_00182 PTS glucitol/sorbitol transporter subunit IIC from Streptococcus parauberis
59% identity, 99% coverage

SMU_311 PTS glucitol/sorbitol transporter subunit IIC from Streptococcus mutans UA159
59% identity, 98% coverage

lp_3620 sorbitol PTS, EIIC from Lactobacillus plantarum WCFS1
57% identity, 97% coverage

lp_3654 sorbitol PTS, EIIC from Lactobacillus plantarum WCFS1
lp_3654 PTS glucitol/sorbitol transporter subunit IIC from Lactiplantibacillus plantarum WCFS1
58% identity, 99% coverage

SEN2673 PTS system, glucitol/sorbitol-specific IIBC component from Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Enteritidis str. P125109
53% identity, 96% coverage

PM1971 unknown from Pasteurella multocida subsp. multocida str. Pm70
52% identity, 98% coverage

PTHC_ERWAM / O32521 PTS system glucitol/sorbitol-specific EIIC component; EIIC-Gut; Glucitol/sorbitol permease IIC component from Erwinia amylovora (Fire blight bacteria) (see paper)
EAM_RS02625 PTS glucitol/sorbitol transporter subunit IIC from Erwinia amylovora ATCC 49946
52% identity, 98% coverage

UGYR_RS07350 PTS glucitol/sorbitol transporter subunit IIC from Yersinia ruckeri
52% identity, 99% coverage

STM14_RS15195 PTS glucitol/sorbitol transporter subunit IIC from Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Typhimurium str. 14028S
STM2832 PTS family, glucitol/sorbitol-specific enzyme IIC component,one of two IIC components from Salmonella typhimurium LT2
52% identity, 96% coverage

CBG46_03170 PTS glucitol/sorbitol transporter subunit IIC from Actinobacillus succinogenes
51% identity, 98% coverage

c3256 PTS system, glucitol/sorbitol-specific IIC2 component from Escherichia coli CFT073
UTI89_C3064 PTS system, glucitol/sorbitol-specific IIC2 component from Escherichia coli UTI89
51% identity, 96% coverage

YE1098 pts system, glucitol/sorbitol-specific iic2 component from Yersinia enterocolitica subsp. enterocolitica 8081
51% identity, 99% coverage

SrlA / b2702 sorbitol-specific PTS enzyme IIC2 component (EC 2.7.1.198; EC 2.7.1.197) from Escherichia coli K-12 substr. MG1655 (see 3 papers)
SrlA / P56579 sorbitol-specific PTS enzyme IIC2 component (EC 2.7.1.198; EC 2.7.1.197) from Escherichia coli (strain K12) (see 3 papers)
PTHC_ECOLI / P56579 PTS system glucitol/sorbitol-specific EIIC component; EIIC-Gut; Glucitol/sorbitol permease IIC component from Escherichia coli (strain K12) (see 2 papers)
TC 4.A.4.1.1 / P56579 PTHC aka SRLA aka GUTA aka SBL aka B2702, component of Glucitol porter from Escherichia coli (see 7 papers)
b2702 glucitol/sorbitol-specific enzyme IIC component of PTS from Escherichia coli str. K-12 substr. MG1655
51% identity, 96% coverage

lmo0544 similar to PTS system, glucitol/sorbitol-specific enzyme II CII component from Listeria monocytogenes EGD-e
45% identity, 95% 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