DisProt: intrinsic protein disorder annotation in 2020

Abstract

The Database of Protein Disorder (DisProt, URL: https://disprot.org) provides manually curated annotations of intrinsically disordered proteins from the literature. Here we report recent developments with DisProt (version 8), including the doubling of protein entries, a new disorder ontology, improvements of the annotation format and a completely new website. The website includes a redesigned graphical interface, a better search engine, a clearer API for programmatic access and a new annotation interface that integrates text mining technologies. The new entry format provides a greater flexibility, simplifies maintenance and allows the capture of more information from the literature. The new disorder ontology has been formalized and made interoperable by adopting the OWL format, as well as its structure and term definitions have been improved. The new annotation interface has made the curation process faster and more effective. We recently showed that new DisProt annotations can be effectively used to train and validate disorder predictors. We believe the growth of DisProt will accelerate, contributing to the improvement of function and disorder predictors and therefore to illuminate the 'dark' proteome.

Figure 1.

Distribution of region length. Regions shorter than 100 residues (left) are binned in groups of 10 residues. Regions longer than 100 (right) are binned in 100 residues. The tick labels indicate the lower bound which is included. Gray bars refer to the previous release (DisProt 7).

Figure 2.

Distribution of disorder annotation terms. Terms belong to the Disorder Ontology and only those one node away from the ontology root are shown. Annotation counts for child terms are propagated to parents up to the root. The dark segments correspond to proteins (left) or residues (right) for which more than one piece of evidence is available. Different ontology aspects (namespaces) are grouped and have different colors.