Dmitry Kuznetsov

ExPASy (http://www.expasy.org) has worldwide reputation as one of the main bioinformatics resources for proteomics. It has now evolved, becoming an extensible and integrative portal accessing many scientific resources, databases and software tools in different areas of life sciences. Scientists can henceforth access seamlessly a wide range of resources in many different domains, such as proteomics, genomics, phylogeny/evolution, systems biology, population genetics, transcriptomics, etc. The individual resources (databases, web-based and downloadable software tools) are hosted in a 'decentralized' way by different groups of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and partner institutions. Specifically, a single web portal provides a common entry point to a wide range of resources developed and operated by different SIB groups and external institutions. The portal features a search function across 'selected' resources. Additionally, the availability and usage of resources are monitored. The portal is aimed for both expert users and people who are not familiar with a specific domain in life sciences. The new web interface provides, in particular, visual guidance for newcomers to ExPASy.

Abstract An efficient methodology, further referred to as ICM, for versatile modeling operations and global energy optimization on arbitrarily fixed multimolecular systems is described. It is aimed at protein structure prediction, homology modeling, molecular docking, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) structure determination, and protein design. The method uses and further develops a previously introduced approach to model biomolecular structures in which bond lengths, bond angles, and torsion angles are considered as independent variables, any subset of them being fixed. Here we simplify and generalize the basic description of the system, introduce the variable dihedral phase angle, and allow arbitrary connections of the molecules and conventional definition of the torsion angles. Algorithms for calculation of energy derivatives with respect to internal variables in the topological tree of the system and for rapid evaluation of accessible surface are presented. Multidimensional variable restraints are proposed to represent the statistical information about the torsion angle distributions in proteins. To incorporate complex energy terms as solvation energy and electrostatics into a structure prediction procedure, a “double‐energy” Monte Carlo minimization procedure in which these terms are omitted during the minimization stage of the random step and included for the comparison with the previous conformation in a Markov chain is proposed and justified. The ICM method is applied successfully to a molecular docking problem. The procedure finds the correct parallel arrangement of two rigid helixes from a leucine zipper domain as the lowest‐energy conformation (0.5 Å root mean square, rms, deviation from the native structure) starting from completely random configuration. Structures with antiparallel helixes or helixes staggered by one helix turn had energies higher by about 7 or 9 kcal/mol, respectively. Soft docking was also attempted. A docking procedure allowing side‐chain flexibility also converged to the parallel configuration starting from the helixes optimized individually. To justdy an internal coordinate approach to the structure prediction as opposed to a Cartesian one, energy hypersurfaces around the native structure of the squash seeds trypsin inhibitor were studied. Torsion angle minimization from the optimal conformation randomly distorted up to the rms deviation of 2.2 Å or angular rms deviation of l0° restored the native conformation in most cases. In contrast, Cartesian coordinate minimization did not reach the minimum from deviations as small as 0.3 Å or 2°. We conclude that the most promising detailed approach to the protein‐folding problem would consist of some coarse global sampling strategy combined with the local energy minimization in the torsion coordinate space. © 1994 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

OrthoDB (https://www.orthodb.org) provides evolutionary and functional annotations of orthologs. This update features a major scaling up of the resource coverage, sampling the genomic diversity of 1271 eukaryotes, 6013 prokaryotes and 6488 viruses. These include putative orthologs among 448 metazoan, 117 plant, 549 fungal, 148 protist, 5609 bacterial, and 404 archaeal genomes, picking up the best sequenced and annotated representatives for each species or operational taxonomic unit. OrthoDB relies on a concept of hierarchy of levels-of-orthology to enable more finely resolved gene orthologies for more closely related species. Since orthologs are the most likely candidates to retain functions of their ancestor gene, OrthoDB is aimed at narrowing down hypotheses about gene functions and enabling comparative evolutionary studies. Optional registered-user sessions allow on-line BUSCO assessments of gene set completeness and mapping of the uploaded data to OrthoDB to enable further interactive exploration of related annotations and generation of comparative charts. The accelerating expansion of genomics data continues to add valuable information, and OrthoDB strives to provide orthologs from the broadest coverage of species, as well as to extensively collate available functional annotations and to compute evolutionary annotations. The data can be browsed online, downloaded or assessed via REST API or SPARQL RDF compatible with both UniProt and Ensembl.

OrthoDB provides evolutionary and functional annotations of genes in a diverse sampling of eukaryotes, prokaryotes, and viruses. Genomics continues to accelerate our exploration of gene diversity and orthology is the most precise way of bridging gene functional knowledge with the rapidly expanding universe of genomic sequences. OrthoDB samples the most diverse organisms with the best quality genomics data to provide the leading coverage of species diversity. This update of the underlying data to over 18 000 prokaryotes and almost 2000 eukaryotes with over 100 million genes propels the coverage to another level. This achievement also demonstrates the scalability of the underlying OrthoLoger software for delineation of orthologs, freely available from https://orthologer.ezlab.org. In addition to the ab-initio computations of gene orthology used for the OrthoDB release, the OrthoLoger software allows mapping of novel gene sets to precomputed orthologs and thereby links to their annotations. The LEMMI-style benchmarking of OrthoLoger ensures its state-of-the-art performance and is available from https://lemortho.ezlab.org. The OrthoDB web interface has been further developed to include a pairwise orthology view from any gene to any other sampled species. OrthoDB-computed evolutionary annotations as well as extensively collated functional annotations can be accessed via REST API or SPARQL/RDF, downloaded or browsed online from https://www.orthodb.org.

OrthoDB is a comprehensive catalog of orthologs, genes inherited by extant species from a single gene in their last common ancestor. In 2016 OrthoDB reached its 9th release, growing to over 22 million genes from over 5000 species, now adding plants, archaea and viruses. In this update we focused on usability of this fast-growing wealth of data: updating the user and programmatic interfaces to browse and query the data, and further enhancing the already extensive integration of available gene functional annotations. Collating functional annotations from over 100 resources, and enabled us to propose descriptive titles for 87% of ortholog groups. Additionally, OrthoDB continues to provide computed evolutionary annotations and to allow user queries by sequence homology. The OrthoDB resource now enables users to generate publication-quality comparative genomics charts, as well as to upload, analyze and interactively explore their own private data. OrthoDB is available from http://orthodb.org.