The Fission Yeast Community Curation Project

Comprehensive manual curation of the S. pombe literature is a primary goal of the PomBase project, and among the most important activities of the curation staff. Increasing numbers of new publications, and a large backlog of older papers, however, mean that complete literature curation will require input from the research community as well as the efforts of dedicated professional curators.

The PomBase Community Curation system allows researchers to contribute annotations directly to PomBase based on their publications. The new system uses the online tool Canto, which supports GO, phenotype, interaction, and modification annotations, and can be configured for use with other ontologies as the need arises. Annotations made in the community curation system will be prioritized for inclusion in PomBase and will therefore also be more rapidly disseminated to other databases (e.g. GenBank/ENA/DDBJ, UniProt, BioGRID and GO). We will also highlight the publications most recently curated by the community on the PomBase site.

For newly published papers, PomBase curators will email authors inviting them to participate, with specific instructions and links. Lab members are also welcome to evaluate existing annotations and create new annotations from past publications -- use the PubMed ID search on the main PomBase Canto page.

Documentation for the PomBase tool is available, and there is a demo version of Canto where anyone can become familiar with the interface and data types.

The Canto home page links to PomBase and other implementations, general Canto documentation, and the demo tool. The source code can also be downloaded.

For a bit of historical perspective, you can browse the results of the Community Curation Pilot Project that took place in 2009.