(Public Library of Science (PLOS), 2015-04-20) Arighi, Cecilia N.; Shamovsky, Veronica; Masci, Anna Maria; Ruttenberg, Alan; Smith, Barry; Natale, Darren A.; Wu, Cathy H.; D’Eustachio, Peter; Cecilia Arighi, Veronica Shamovsky, Anna Maria Masci, Alan Ruttenberg, Barry Smith, Darren A. Natale, Cathy Wu, Peter D’Eustachio; Arighi, Cecilia; Wu, Cathy
The Protein Ontology (PRO) provides terms for and supports annotation of species-specific
protein complexes in an ontology framework that relates them both to their components and
to species-independent families of complexes. Comprehensive curation of experimentally
known forms and annotations thereof is expected to expose discrepancies, differences, and
gaps in our knowledge. We have annotated the early events of innate immune signaling mediated
by Toll-Like Receptor 3 and 4 complexes in human, mouse, and chicken. The resulting
ontology and annotation data set has allowed us to identify species-specific gaps in
experimental data and possible functional differences between species, and to employ inferred
structural and functional relationships to suggest plausible resolutions of these discrepancies
and gaps.