A crowdsourcing open platform for literature curation in UniProt

The UniProt knowledgebase is a public database for protein sequence and function, covering the tree of life and over 220 million protein entries.Now, the whole community can use a new crowdsourcing annotation system to help scale up UniProt curation and receive proper attribution for their biocuration work.UniProt is a public source of protein sequence and function information.It includes proteins from the entire tree of life, serving a wide user community across diverse fields.The UniProt knowledgebase (UniProtKB) contains protein information derived by expert curation (Swiss-Prot section) and automated annotation (TrEMBL section) [1].Expert curation involves a critical review of the experimental data from the literature and interpretation of the results from sequence analysis tools [2].Currently, the UniProtKB contains over 220 million protein entries (Release 2021_03).Proteins from most organisms are unreviewed and only annotated via automatic annotation.This is due in part to a lack of direct experimental data available and a limited curation task force.Still, there is a significant number of proteins with some level of characterization or new information, awaiting annotation from the literature.Many UniProt users are highly engaged and motivated in providing feedback about entries in the database, especially when data are missing or an update is needed as UniProtKB is a highly valued resource and critical to their work.Users have vested interest that the knowledgebase is comprehensively annotated.Engaging the research community in helping support curation or directly curating a resource has been an ongoing and evolving effort by many biological knowledge resources [3][4][5].Here, we present a novel crowdsourcing community annotation system that enables researchers to quickly add annotations from the literature to UniProtKB protein entries.As opposed to past feedback options, this mechanism provides a systematic solution for community input, with a fast turnaround for presenting the added information to the community, and uses ORCID (https://orcid.org/)for authentication and acknowledgment of the contributions.