Curation
Like the other modules of AutDB, content of the PIN module originates entirely from published scientific literature. MindSpec researchers systematically search, collect and extract information on direct protein interactions of ASD risk genes based on a multi-level annotation model:
- Consultation with publicly available molecular interaction databases (HPRD, BioGRID)
- Extraction from commercial molecular interaction software (Pathway Studio 7.1)
- Manual searches of PubMed including the following keywords:(Gene Symbol OR Aliases) AND (interact* OR bind* OR regulat* OR function)
- Verification of every interaction by manually curating information directly from primary reference articles
Our manual curation was critical for comprehensive extraction of ASD protein interactions, as it comprised the largest source of primary references for the current PIN dataset (see Statistics tab).
