Re-annotation of the sequence > annotation: opportunities for the functional microbiologist.

Abstract

Functional annotation of proteins has been central to the development of biology in the post-genomic era. In such a way, the wealth of information encoded by genome sequences has become accessible to the broader biological community. One may even argue that this has served the purpose of democratization of science, as almost every scientist in the world has access to both genetic public databases and the little computing power needed for doing similarity Blast searches. However, I will argue here that this framework is flawed as it sticks to the once very useful, but now limited and simplistic assumption, that ‘anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants’, a famous statement by Jacques Monod around half a century ago.