Mining Phenotypes for Protein Function Prediction

Until very recently, phenotypes only very rarely were studied in a systematic manner. While ontologies for describing gene functions now have a 10 year long tradition, similar vocabularies for describing the phenotype of genes are only emerging now; similarly, the techniques for determining phenotypes on a large scale (especially RNAi) are available only for a few years, while genomic sequencing or gene expression studies are already established for a much longer time. In this talk, we describe results from a study for exploiting phenotype descriptions for protein function prediction. We used the data from PhenomicsDB, a phenotype database integrated from several publicly available data sources. Due to the lack of standardization, phenotypes in PhenomicsDB can only be viewed as text (short statements, abstracts, singular terms, A¢â‚¬Â¦). We clustered these texts and analyzed the corresponding gene clusters in terms of their coherence in functional annotation and their interconnectedness by protein-protein-interactions. We also devised a method for using the close similarity in their phenotype descriptions to predict the function of proteins. We show that this methods yields a very good precision at acceptable coverage.