PaperBLAST – Find papers about a protein or its homologs

 

PaperBLAST

PaperBLAST Hits for VIMSS14605 conserved inner membrane protein (125 a.a., MQRIILIIIG...)

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:

YbaN / b0468 DUF454 domain-containing inner membrane protein YbaN from Escherichia coli K-12 substr. MG1655 (see 2 papers)
b0468 conserved inner membrane protein from Escherichia coli str. K-12 substr. MG1655
Z0585 putative gene 58 from Escherichia coli O157:H7 EDL933
SF5M90T_438 DUF454 family protein from Shigella flexneri 5a str. M90T
100% identity, 100% coverage

SEET0819_09365, STM14_0567 DUF454 family protein from Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Typhimurium str. 14028S
84% identity, 100% coverage

VC1052 conserved hypothetical protein from Vibrio cholerae O1 biovar eltor str. N16961
Q9KT53 Inner membrane protein from Vibrio cholerae serotype O1 (strain ATCC 39315 / El Tor Inaba N16961)
44% identity, 93% coverage

BUE60_21160 YbaN family protein from Pseudomonas syringae pv. actinidiae
40% identity, 84% coverage

BQ00830 hypothetical protein from Bartonella quintana str. Toulouse
51% identity, 60% coverage

Rmet_0221 YbaN family protein from Cupriavidus metallidurans CH34
41% identity, 74% coverage

SAOUHSC_00131 hypothetical protein from Staphylococcus aureus subsp. aureus NCTC 8325
SA0161 hypothetical protein from Staphylococcus aureus subsp. aureus N315
NWMN_0112 hypothetical protein from Staphylococcus aureus subsp. aureus str. Newman
35% identity, 96% coverage

HD1939 conserved hypothetical protein from Haemophilus ducreyi 35000HP
41% identity, 84% coverage

Smlt3895 putative transmembrane protein from Stenotrophomonas maltophilia K279a
44% identity, 63% coverage

DIP2356 Putative conserved membrane protein from Corynebacterium diphtheriae NCTC 13129
49% identity, 52% coverage

APL_1806 hypothetical protein from Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae L20
36% identity, 86% coverage

ACICU_RS04605, DMO12_RS04720 YbaN family protein from Acinetobacter baumannii ACICU
ACICU_00880 hypothetical protein from Acinetobacter baumannii ACICU
32% identity, 76% coverage

ABLAC_16850 YbaN family protein from Acinetobacter baumannii LAC-4
32% identity, 76% coverage

SH1866 hypothetical protein from Staphylococcus haemolyticus JCSC1435
31% identity, 96% coverage

PP1004 conserved hypothetical protein from Pseudomonas putida KT2440
33% identity, 85% coverage

SMLT_RS19415 YbaN family protein from Stenotrophomonas maltophilia K279a
33% identity, 77% coverage

SPO0005 YbaN family protein from Ruegeria pomeroyi DSS-3
42% identity, 86% coverage

Dshi_1454 hypothetical protein from Dinoroseobacter shibae DFL 12
31% identity, 70% coverage

SMb20557 CONSERVED HYPOTHETICAL PROTEIN from Sinorhizobium meliloti 1021
48% identity, 72% 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 789,361 different protein sequences to 1,256,019 scientific articles. Searches against EuropePMC were last performed on January 10 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