PaperBLAST – Find papers about a protein or its homologs

 

PaperBLAST

PaperBLAST Hits for XP_001391544.1 uncharacterized protein (Aspergillus niger) (244 a.a., MRSFSDSISR...)

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 21 similar proteins in the literature:

An07g04620 uncharacterized protein from Aspergillus niger
100% identity, 100% coverage

AFUA_5G08800, Afu5g08800 conserved hypothetical protein from Aspergillus fumigatus Af293
65% identity, 98% coverage

X325_EMENI / Q5B428 Lytic polysaccharide monooxygenase-like protein ANIA_04702; LPMO-like protein ANIA_04702; X325 family protein ANIA_04702 from Emericella nidulans (strain FGSC A4 / ATCC 38163 / CBS 112.46 / NRRL 194 / M139) (Aspergillus nidulans) (see paper)
63% identity, 98% coverage

PADG_07354 uncharacterized protein from Paracoccidioides brasiliensis Pb18
52% identity, 95% coverage

FVEG_13122 hypothetical protein from Fusarium verticillioides 7600
51% identity, 95% coverage

FFUJ_05566 uncharacterized protein from Fusarium fujikuroi IMI 58289
53% identity, 93% coverage

FGSG_02810 hypothetical protein from Fusarium graminearum PH-1
55% identity, 91% coverage

FPSE_05581 hypothetical protein from Fusarium pseudograminearum CS3096
55% identity, 91% coverage

XP_008598424 GPI anchored protein, putative from Beauveria bassiana ARSEF 2860
55% identity, 80% coverage

ISF_08023 hypothetical protein from Cordyceps fumosorosea ARSEF 2679
49% identity, 78% coverage

NECHADRAFT_92223 uncharacterized protein from Fusarium vanettenii 77-13-4
55% identity, 82% coverage

X325_NEUCR / V5IRP6 Lytic polysaccharide monooxygenase-like protein ham-7; LPMO-like protein ham-7; Hyphal anastamosis protein 7; X325 family protein ham-7 from Neurospora crassa (strain ATCC 24698 / 74-OR23-1A / CBS 708.71 / DSM 1257 / FGSC 987) (see 3 papers)
57% identity, 73% coverage

PADG_04289 uncharacterized protein from Paracoccidioides brasiliensis Pb18
32% identity, 79% coverage

CIMG_07738 uncharacterized protein from Coccidioides immitis RS
31% identity, 89% coverage

C3VER8 Copper acquisition factor BIM1-like domain-containing protein from Hyaloscypha finlandica
33% identity, 67% coverage

VC83_07867 uncharacterized protein from Pseudogymnoascus destructans
32% identity, 82% coverage

FPRO_01717 uncharacterized protein from Fusarium proliferatum ET1
29% identity, 66% coverage

An12g07750 uncharacterized protein from Aspergillus niger
29% identity, 77% coverage

Afu6g02800 GPI anchored protein, putative from Aspergillus fumigatus Af293
B0YDG5 GPI anchored protein, putative from Aspergillus fumigatus (strain CBS 144.89 / FGSC A1163 / CEA10)
27% identity, 80% coverage

CIMG_10032 expression library immunization antigen 1 from Coccidioides immitis RS
29% identity, 58% coverage

PADG_04649 uncharacterized protein from Paracoccidioides brasiliensis Pb18
27% identity, 55% 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