TGF-beta signaling proteins and the Protein Ontology

Cecilia N Arighi, Hongfang Liu, Darren A Natale, Winona C Barker, Harold Drabkin, Judith A Blake, Barry Smith and Cathy H Wu. BMC Bioinformatics 2009, 10(Suppl 5):S3doi:10.1186/1471-2105-10-S5-S3.

The Protein Ontology (PRO) is designed as a formal and principled Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry ontology for proteins. The components of PRO extend from a classification of proteins on the basis of evolutionary relationships at the homeomorphic level to the representation of the multiple protein forms of a gene, including those resulting from alternative splicing, cleavage and/or post-translational modifications. Focusing specifically on the TGF-beta signaling proteins, we describe the building, curation, usage and dissemination of PRO.