Recently, Naithani (BPP, OSU) and Jaiswal lab (BPP, OSU) jointly published a research article “Beyond gene ontology (GO): using biocuration approach to improve the gene nomenclature and functional annotation of rice S-domain kinase subfamily” in #openAcess journal PeerJ (Life & Environment). Sushma Naithani is the lead and corresponding author of this paper. Daemon Dikeman (Honors college, OSU), an undergraduate student supervised by Naithani for the Honors thesis, made a major contribution to this work. The other authors from the Jaiswal lab include an undergraduate biocurator Priyanka Garg, Noor Al-Bader (Ph.D. student; Graduated in 2019), and Pankaj Jaiswal.In this study, the authors demonstrated the need for a biocuration approach to complement automated gene ontology (GO) protocols for assigning accurate gene annotations and associations with biological processes for large gene families and proposed revised nomenclature for 144 rice genes belonging to S-domain Receptor-Like Kinase (SDRLK)gene subfamily. These improved gene annotations were shared with UniProt (https://www.uniprot.org) and RAP (https://rapdb.dna.affrc.go.jp) databases. This study shows how researchers can contribute to improving the quality and contents of public databases and genomic resources.
This article is available free-of-cost at https://peerj.com/articles/11052/.