The MIntAct project--IntAct as a common curation platform for 11 molecular interaction databases.

IntAct (freely available at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/intact) is an open-source, open data molecular interaction database populated by data either curated from the literature or from direct data depositions. IntAct has developed a sophisticated web-based curation tool, capable of supporting both IMEx- and MIMIx-level curation. This tool is now utilized by multiple additional curation teams, all of whom annotate data directly into the IntAct database. Members of the IntAct team supply appropriate levels of training, perform quality control on entries and take responsibility for long-term data maintenance. Recently, the MINT and IntAct databases decided to merge their separate efforts to make optimal use of limited developer resources and maximize the curation output. All data manually curated by the MINT curators have been moved into the IntAct database at EMBL-EBI and are merged with the existing IntAct dataset. Both IntAct and MINT are active contributors to the IMEx consortium (http://www.imexconsortium.org).

The UniProt-GO Annotation database in 2011.

The GO annotation dataset provided by the UniProt Consortium (GOA: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/GOA) is a comprehensive set of evidenced-based associations between terms from the Gene Ontology resource and UniProtKB proteins. Currently supplying over 100 million annotations to 11 million proteins in more than 360,000 taxa, this resource has increased 2-fold over the last 2 years and has benefited from a wealth of checks to improve annotation correctness and consistency as well as now supplying a greater information content enabled by GO Consortium annotation format developments. Detailed, manual GO annotations obtained from the curation of peer-reviewed papers are directly contributed by all UniProt curators and supplemented with manual and electronic annotations from 36 model organism and domain-focused scientific resources. The inclusion of high-quality, automatic annotation predictions ensures the UniProt GO annotation dataset supplies functional information to a wide range of proteins, including those from poorly characterized, non-model organism species. UniProt GO annotations are freely available in a range of formats accessible by both file downloads and web-based views. In addition, the introduction of a new, normalized file format in 2010 has made for easier handling of the complete UniProt-GOA data set.

Induction of enhanced green fluorescent protein expression in response to lesions in the nervous system.

We have generated a mouse strain carrying a transgene driven by a strong and ubiquitous promoter (human cytomegalovirus hCMV/beta-actin) and containing an enhanced green fluorescent protein (eGFP) coding sequence upstream of the 3' untranslated region (3'UTR) of tissue-type plasminogen activator (t-PA) mRNA. The 3'UTR of t-PA mRNA is known to be involved in the reversible deadenylation and translational repression of transcripts in mouse oocytes. hCMV/beta-actin-eGFP-3'UTR t-PA transgenic mice express eGFP mRNA in all brain structures analyzed but lack eGFP fluorescence, with the exception of blood vessels, choroid plexus, and Purkinje cells. Taking advantage of these features, we tested whether certain pathological conditions, in particular injuries of the nervous system, might trigger eGFP fluorescence in traumatized cells or neurons. From this perspective, we analyzed eGFP mRNA expression and eGFP fluorescence in experimental models of nervous system lesions, such as motoneuron axotomy and cerebral stroke induced by middle cerebral artery occlusion. We found an increase in eGFP fluorescence in specific brain areas in cells suffering or reacting to these injuries. This increased fluorescence is correlated with an increased transcription of eGFP in lesioned cells, presumably enhanced by a release of the translational silencing mediated by the 3'UTR region of the t-PA mRNA. This transgenic mouse model may prove useful to study the development of neurodegenerative lesions.