Proteasix Ontology (PxO) is a new application ontology that supports the Proteasix tool (http://www.proteasix.org/). Proteasix is an open-source peptide-centric tool that can be used to predict automatically and in a large-scale fashion in silico the proteases involved in the generation proteolytic cleavage fragments (peptides). Body fluids (e.g. serum, urine, cerebrospinal fluid) contain thousands of peptides. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the proteolytic mechanisms leading to the generation of these fragments, which may hold the key to a better understanding of molecular mechanisms of disease, define new biomarkers, and therapeutic targets for a variety of disorders such as kidney, cardiovascular, autoimmune and infectious diseases as well as certain types of cancer. Proteasix addresses this by using the N- and C-terminal sequences of peptides which are reconstructed using information from Uniprot and knowledge about cleavage sites to predict the possible proteases that were involved in their generation. This is a knowledge intensive task and the new version of Proteasix uses an ontology to provide this knowledge.

Robert Stevens ‎[robert.stevens@manchester.ac.uk]‎