PROTEIN INFORMATION RESOURCE FOR THE NEXT MILLENNIUM

生物技术时代正在产生新的和高度相互关联的基因组信息的知识爆炸。 蛋白质，基因的表达，主要负责生物有机体的功能障碍，因此，直接关系到人类的健康和疾病。蛋白质信息资源（PIR）的广泛，长期目标是成为科学界支持功能和结构基因组研究的重要公共领域资源。 具体目标是：（1）提供全面、及时、精确注释、完全分类、广泛交叉引用、可免费访问的PIR蛋白质序列和辅助数据库，以及序列分析和家族分类工具;（2）进一步开发生物信息学基础设施，以支持PIR数据库活动，并促进与科学界的合作和交流;和（3）与科学界建立强有力的双向沟通，以获得准确的PIR注释以及传播和评估。 研究设计的关键要素是：（I）将蛋白质全面分类为非重叠家族和超家族，识别同源结构域和功能基序，以实现自动，快速和准确的分类和注释。 (2)PIR知识库系统包含全面的蛋白质家族、功能和结构信息，以及与具有分布式对象计算框架的对象关系数据库管理系统中的多个异构外部数据库的链接，并且集成数据库和数据分析和挖掘工具以促进蛋白质信息、蛋白质结构和功能的探索以及准确的基因组注释。 (3)PIR专家科学理事会，社区参与和参与公共领域序列数据库维护的新范例。 积极的社区交流将使PIR获得专家的科学贡献，获得用户的要求和评价，促进科学合作，促进数据库的互操作性，并提供广泛的系统分布。 这些目标的成功完成将使PIR成为基础科学知识发现的重要资源，以了解人类健康。

The era of biotechnology is spawning a knowledge explosion of new and highly interrelated genomic information. Proteins, the expression of genes, are primarily responsible for the functioning of malfunctioning of the biological organism and, thus, are directly related to health and disease for humans. The broad, long-term objective of the Protein Information Resource (PIR) is to be a significant public domain resource for the scientific community that supports functional and structural genomic research. The specific aims are (1) to provide comprehensive, timely, acutely annotated, fully classified extensively cross-referenced, and freely accessible PIR protein sequence and auxiliary databases, together with sequence analysis and family classification tools, (2) to further develop a bioinformatics infrastructure to support PIR database activities and to foster collaboration and communication with the scientific community, and (3) to establish robust two-way communication with the scientific community for accurate PIR annotation and for dissemination and evaluation. The key elements of the research design are: (I) Comprehensive classification of proteins into non-overlapping families and superfamilies, with identification of homology domains and functional motifs, to allow automatic, rapid, and accurate classification and annotation. (2) The PIR knowledge base system that contains comprehensive protein family, functional, and structural information, as well as linkage to multiple, heterogeneous external databases, in an object-relational database management system with a distributed object computing framework, and that integrates databases and data analysis and mining tools to facilitate protein information, exploration of protein structure and function, and accurate genome annotation. (3) The PIR Expert Scientific Council, a new paradigm for community involvement and participation in the maintenance of a public domain sequence database. Active community communication will allow PIR to obtain expert scientific contributions, acquire user requirements and evaluation, foster scientific cooperation and promote database interoperability, and provide wide system distribution. A successful completion of these aims will allow PIR to become an essential resource for basic scientific knowledge discovery towards the understanding of human health.