MoCeIS-DCL : Building a Network for Functional Annotation of Protein Families

The proposal is to support a conference to build a roadmap to break a major barrier limiting the capacity of the biological community at large to mine available genomic information. The two-day conference will be held in the Fall of 2021 in North Florida. The goals of the conference are to 1) create a diverse scientific community that can help build the framework, tools, guidelines and training that will allow the extraction of all available knowledge on all members of a protein family, 2) correctly link this knowledge to the iso-functional subgroups within the family, and 3) visualize the data in an intuitive and interactive fashion.

The information in genomic sequences cannot be fully exploited until the functions of the predicted proteins are known. The experimentalists that obtain the information about protein function are not always aware of how their data are captured in databases and many of them do not actively contribute their expertise to help capture and curate this information.

This conference will devise strategies that can educate biologists to make them an integral part of the functional data flow, in order to make biological data more explorable, sharable, and interoperable.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.