Analysing proteomics identifications in the context of functional and structural protein annotation: integrating annotation using PICR, DAS, and BioMart.

For many species, there is a wealth of detailed annotation of individual proteins available to the proteomics researcher. Accessing and making the best use of this annotation can be problematic in the absence of suitable bioinformatics support. This chapter explores some of the technologies and tools that allow protein annotation to be accessed and collated from multiple sources. The intended audience is the proteomics scientist who has limited or no access to bioinformatics/programming support and wishes to make the best use of existing resources to annotate sets of protein identifications derived from mass spectrometry and related techniques.