Roadblock: Improved annotations do not necessarily translate into new functional insights

Hall, Nicola A. L., Carlyle, Becky C., Haerty, Wilfried ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0111-191X and Tunbridge, Elizabeth M. (2021) Roadblock: Improved annotations do not necessarily translate into new functional insights. Genome Biology, 22 (1). ISSN 1474-760X

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Abstract

The advent of cost-effective high-throughput nucleotide sequencing means that information about the transcriptome is accruing at an exponential rate, rapidly refining our understanding of the diversity of gene products. It is important that these findings are readily accessible to the wider scientific community to maximise their impact. However, there are multiple barriers to their efficient dissemination and their translation into functional insights. Here, we outline how the status quo can result in information becoming siloed and/or ambiguous, using the CACNA1C gene, which encodes a voltage-gated calcium channel, as an example. We highlight three areas that pose potential barriers to effective information transfer and offer suggestions as to how these may be addressed: firstly, a lack of clarity about the strength of the evidence for individual transcripts in current annotations; secondly, limitations to the transfer of information between nucleotide and protein databases; thirdly, challenges relating to the nomenclature used for transcriptional events and RNA modifications, both for genomic researchers and the wider scientific community.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: ecology, evolution, behavior and systematics,genetics,cell biology ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1100/1105
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Science > School of Biological Sciences
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Centres > Norwich Institute for Healthy Aging
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Depositing User: LivePure Connector
Date Deposited: 03 Dec 2021 01:44
Last Modified: 21 Apr 2023 01:16
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/82510
DOI: 10.1186/s13059-021-02542-5

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