¶ Protein Ontology
PRO provides an ontological representation of protein-related entities by explicitly defining them and showing the relationships between them. Each PRO term represents a distinct class of entities (including specific modified forms, orthologous isoforms, and protein complexes) ranging from the taxon-neutral to the taxon-specific (e.g. the entity representing all protein products of the human SMAD2 gene is described in PR:Q15796; one particular human SMAD2 protein form, phosphorylated on the last two serines of a conserved C-terminal SSxS motif is defined by PR:000025934).
¶ Website
(image, above, featured on the landing page of PRO)
¶ User Notes
- This resource is particularly notable in that it utilizes and maintains entries of protein-related entities through dedicated permalinks (OBO Foundry Permanent URLs); see the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry GitHub page and the breakdown of this effort, also on GitHub
- Browse and search features are useful for examining Gene Ontology as it is applied across databases/resources; caution is advised in that it should always be considered how applicable these characterizations are for a specific protein/gene, organism or study system
¶ Ease of Use
- Updated regularly in a highly transparent fashion
- Use difficulty is dependent upon the familiarity of a user with either gene ontology or protein identifiers/accessions; if more help is needed, see the website's provided wiki resource (linked below)
¶ Help
¶ Citation
- Natale DA, Arighi CN, Blake JA, Bona J, Chen C, Chen SC, Christie KR, Cowart J, D'Eustachio P, Diehl AD, Drabkin HJ, Duncan WD, Huang H, Ren J, Ross K, Ruttenberg A, Shamovsky V, Smith B, Wang Q, Zhang J, El-Sayed A, Wu CH. "Protein Ontology (PRO): enhancing and scaling up the representation of protein entities." Nucleic Acids Res. 2017, 45(D1): D339-D346.