The SIB - Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and GeneBio today announced the launch of neXtProt, an on-line knowledge platform centered on human proteins. This exceptional resource provides life scientists with a broad spectrum of information on all human proteins via an intuitive interface. With already over 25,000 unique visitors since its first Beta release in January of this year, neXtProt is expected to become the central resource for any life scientist who requires high-quality information on human proteins in the context of modern biomedical research.
The SIB and GeneBio’s scientists, developers and bio-curators, have been working closely together since 2009, under the leadership of Prof. Amos Bairoch and Dr. Lydie Lane, to address one of the major problems faced by life scientists today: making sense of the huge body of human protein-related data in order to facilitate knowledge creation and therefore scientific innovation.
High-quality content on human proteins
At the content level, neXtProt aims to be a comprehensive resource on human proteins, including information such as proteins’ function, subcellular location, expression, interactions and role in diseases.
Rigorous standards are applied before any data is added to neXtProt, ensuring a commitment to the quality that the Swiss are renowned for.
Prof. Bairoch says, “technological advances have allowed the life sciences to accumulate enormous amount of data. It is therefore essential to provide researchers with the tools to fish out knowledge from such an ocean of data. We are building neXtProt to answer such a challenge. We have a long road in front of us, but we are confident that, thanks to the SIB world-renown expertise in protein biocuration and our extensive network of collaborators, we will be able to achieve our goals.”
The current Beta version of neXtProt builds upon the complete human proteins-related information contained in the UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot knowledgebase, to which unique information relative to protein expression and variants from the Human Protein Atlas (HPA), Bgee and Ensembl was integrated by the SIB biocurators.
Scientific collaboration and innovation
neXtProt provides user-friendly tools to access this unparalleled content. The powerful and intuitive search functionality combined with innovative data representation simplifies data mining. Users can personalize their discoveries of proteins and sets of proteins in context using favorites and tags. More than a database, neXtProt is developed in the spirit of an open collaborative platform to foster collective intelligence.
GeneBio brings to this project the software development expertise and business acumen of its long-standing team. Nasri Nahas, CEO of GeneBio, says, “neXtProt faces up to a major challenge our customers are experiencing by offering them the tools to turn large quantities of data into knowledge. With second-to-none quality data and a set of intuitive features, we believe that this new product offering will enhance scientific discovery and innovation.”
To achieve these ambitious goals, the neXtProt team is working closely with users in both academia and industry to develop features and include content the community requires. In this context, the next major development goal is linked with our close collaboration with the Human Proteomics Organization (HUPO) in the support of the Human Proteomics Project (HPP). HPP is a very important initiative whose goal is to produce a comprehensive catalog of all human proteins using various proteomics technologies. The 10th Annual World Congress of HUPO will take place in Geneva on September 4 to 7, 2011. During this conference, we will launch a new version of neXtProt that will address some of the needs of the proteomics community.
Collaborations are key to the success of neXtProt as only through data sharing and partnerships can researchers unlock the role of human proteins in health and disease.
Visit neXtProt at: www.nextprot.org