|
|
|
A rapidly growing genomics driven discovery company based in USA
Customer has engaged Molecular Connections to provide comprehensive protein target interaction information from literature.
Challenge faced by Customer's scientists
At Customer, a target discovery company, the research activities are focused at Genomic profiling of disease tissues that often results in the identification of rare and unique target genes about which little is known. Validation of these targets requires a combination of experimental and theoretical methods. To aid in this target validation process, knowledge of interactions and pathways that these individual proteins participate in or cross react with, becomes essential. Thus in order to further screen and short-list from these large number of protein targets, Customer's research team needed to study protein interactions in a comprehensive fashion from the literature in a systematic fashion.
Solution Implemented by Molecular Connections
Molecular Connections' instituted a team of curators (MS in Biological Sciences) along with senior scientists (Ph.D. in Molecular Biology) as the validation experts. The team worked out a detailed scope of the literature curation based on the requirements given by Customer's research team. These requirements were used to design a customized database designed to extract, validate and capture various kinds of protein interactions including protein-protein, protein-small molecule, protein-other bio-molecule (like RNA etc.). The database initially designed was substantially modified at a later instance, to accommodate changes in the client's data requirements.
The curators at MC used a standardized curation and annotation manual to ensure uniformity and standardization in the data collection process. Interaction information was captured from abstracts using the set of rules defined in the curation manual. This was followed by validation and quality check where in all the interactions were cross checked by the senior scientist to minimize the errors. This senior scientist used an internal proprietary validation tool to ensure scientific accuracy and uniformity of the information captured.
Value Derived by the customer
The customer's scientific team was able to
- Obtain comprehensive interaction data on the target gene/proteins of interest along with appropriate experimental method that would provide a reliability index to the data
- Highly granular data format that allows cross reference comparison and analysis
- Extensively quality checked and reliable data
- Protein/gene names are indexed based on locus link convention that enables linking the data to any of the proprietary or public domain databases
- Protein-interaction data sourced entirely from published literature in uniform fashion for easy analysis and decision-making.
- Regular updates that on all the targets of interest.
- Saved substantial time and accelerated many of their internal discovery programs.
- Significant costs advantage (atleast 50%) in comparison to the alternatives available
Present Status
The customer continues to provide list of interested protein targets each month for Molecular Connections' team to curate and annotate from literature. Molecular Connections' curation team continues to provide the curated information database every month meeting all the quality parameters and dead-lines set by the customer.
|
|
