PaperBLAST – Find papers about a protein or its homologs

 

PaperBLAST

PaperBLAST Hits for TCDB::Q97UF5 AraS, component of Arabinose, fructose, xylose porter (Sulfolobus solfataricus) (620 a.a., MSRRRLYKAI...)

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 17 similar proteins in the literature:

TC 3.A.1.1.14 / Q97UF5 AraS, component of Arabinose, fructose, xylose porter from Sulfolobus solfataricus (see paper)
SSO3066 Arabinose ABC transporter, arabinose binding protein from Sulfolobus solfataricus P2
100% identity, 100% coverage

GLCS_SACS2 / Q97UZ1 Glucose-binding protein GlcS; GBP from Saccharolobus solfataricus (strain ATCC 35092 / DSM 1617 / JCM 11322 / P2) (Sulfolobus solfataricus) (see 2 papers)
TC 3.A.1.1.13 / Q97UZ1 GlcS, component of Glucose, mannose, galactose porter from Sulfolobus solfataricus (see paper)
SSO2847 Sugar-binding periplasmic protein from Sulfolobus solfataricus P2
45% identity, 69% coverage

TC 3.A.1.1.24 / Q72KX2 Glucose-binding protein aka TT_C0328, component of The glucose/mannose porter TTC0326-8 plus MalK1 (ABC protein, shared with 3.A.1.1.25) from Thermus thermophilus (strain HB27 / ATCC BAA-163 / DSM 7039) (see paper)
TTC0328 No description from Thermus thermophilus HB27
27% identity, 51% coverage

SY28_RS04315 ABC transporter substrate-binding protein from Meiothermus taiwanensis
26% identity, 57% coverage

2b3bA / Q72KX2 Thermus thermophilus glucose/galactose binding protein with bound glucose (see paper)
27% identity, 51% coverage

CTN_0660 Extracellular solute-binding protein, family 1 precursor from Thermotoga neapolitana DSM 4359
25% identity, 60% coverage

PH1214 cytoplasmic protein from Pyrococcus horikoshii OT3
23% identity, 51% coverage

BCAL3041 maltose-binding protein from Burkholderia cenocepacia J2315
27% identity, 33% coverage

BTH_I1553 maltose ABC transporter, periplasmic maltose-binding protein from Burkholderia thailandensis E264
27% identity, 33% coverage

BPSL2611 maltose-binding protein from Burkholderia pseudomallei K96243
27% identity, 33% coverage

RL4252 putative solute-binding component of ABC transporter from Rhizobium leguminosarum bv. viciae 3841
24% identity, 49% coverage

RLV_4312 ABC transporter substrate-binding protein from Rhizobium leguminosarum bv. viciae
24% identity, 49% coverage

NGR_c33060 predicted bacterial extracellular solute-binding protein from Rhizobium sp. NGR234
24% identity, 49% coverage

NGR_c33060 ABC transporter substrate-binding protein from Sinorhizobium fredii NGR234
24% identity, 49% coverage

RL1824 putative solute-binding component of ABC transporter from Rhizobium leguminosarum bv. viciae 3841
24% identity, 49% coverage

SMc04396 PUTATIVE PERIPLASMIC BINDING PROTEIN from Sinorhizobium meliloti 1021
25% identity, 49% coverage

4g68A / J9PBT4 Biochemical and structural insights into xylan utilization by the thermophilic bacteriumcaldanaerobius polysaccharolyticus (see paper)
26% identity, 17% 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