Abstract
Motivation: Detailed curation of published molecular data is essential for any model organism database. Community curation enables researchers to contribute data from their papers directly to databases, supplementing the activity of professional curators and improving coverage of a growing body of literature. We have developed Canto, a web-based tool that provides an intuitive curation interface for both curators and researchers, to support community curation in the fission yeast database, PomBase. Canto supports curation using OBO ontologies, and can be easily configured for use with any species.Availability: Canto code and documentation are available under an Open Source license from http://curation.pombase.org/. Canto is a component of the Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD) project (http://www.gmod.org/).Contact: helpdesk@pombase.org
Highlights
The major activity of any model organism database (MOD) is the manual curation of gene-specific information from peerreviewed research articles, a time- and labour-intensive process that involves reading publications and associating novel biological information with genes or other biological features
Several factors motivate databases to develop alternative curation strategies to supplement the efforts of professional curators to maintain comprehensive annotation
Curators’ biological knowledge tends towards breadth rather than depth; a curator may annotate a paper on an unfamiliar topic in less than optimal detail, or make errors that experts would avoid
Summary
The major activity of any model organism database (MOD) is the manual curation of gene-specific information from peerreviewed research articles, a time- and labour-intensive process that involves reading publications and associating novel biological information with genes or other biological features. Several factors motivate databases to develop alternative curation strategies to supplement the efforts of professional curators to maintain comprehensive annotation. PomBase (Wood et al, 2012), the MOD for the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, has introduced a community curation initiative that engages researchers in direct curation of their publications, addressing issues of both literature volume and specialized knowledge simultaneously. We have developed Canto, a web-based tool that enables professional curators and publication authors to capture detailed biological. Canto can be configured to use gene (or gene product) identifiers for any species, as well as any of several ontologies, and can be readily adapted for diverse uses
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