Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on January 5, 2006
Bioinformatics 2006 22(5):637-640; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btk027
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ORegAnno: an open access database and curation system for literature-derived promoters, transcription factor binding sites and regulatory variation
1Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre, British Columbia Cancer Agency 100-570 West 7th Avenue, Vancouver, BC, Canada V5Z 4E6
2Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester Michael Smith Building, Oxford Road, M13 9PT Manchester, UK
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
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ABSTRACT |
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 TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTIONDESCRIPTION OF THE ORegAnno...CURRENT CONTENT OF THE...ACCESSCONCLUSIONSREFERENCES |
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Motivation: Our understanding of gene regulation is currently limited by our ability to collectively synthesize and catalogue transcriptional regulatory elements stored in scientific literature. Over the past decade, this task has become increasingly challenging as the accrual of biologically validated regulatory sequences has accelerated. To meet this challenge, novel community-based approaches to regulatory element annotation are required.
Summary: Here, we present the Open Regulatory Annotation (ORegAnno) database as a dynamic collection of literature-curated regulatory regions, transcription factor binding sites and regulatory mutations (polymorphisms and haplotypes). ORegAnno has been designed to manage the submission, indexing and validation of new annotations from users worldwide. Submissions to ORegAnno are immediately cross-referenced to EnsEMBL, dbSNP, Entrez Gene, the NCBI Taxonomy database and PubMed, where appropriate.
Availability: ORegAnno is available directly through MySQL, Web services, and online at http://www.oreganno.org. All software is licensed under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL).
Contact: sjones{at}bcgsc.ca
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INTRODUCTION |
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TOPABSTRACTINTRODUCTIONDESCRIPTION OF THE ORegAnno...CURRENT CONTENT OF THE...ACCESSCONCLUSIONSREFERENCES |
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The effectiveness of bioinformatics methods for identifying regulatory regions in genomic sequence is dependent on our understanding of gene regulation biology in its natural state. This is particularly evident in that models of transcription factor binding in regulatory regions have underpinned the development of such bioinformatics methods as phylogenetic footprinting, transcription factor binding matrices and motif clustering (Wasserman and Sandelin, 2004). However, the predictive ability of algorithms which implement these methods has been predominantly indeterminate, as their assessment has relied on datasets containing few biologically validated regulatory regions (Tompa et al., 2005). To enrich these datasets, several databases have been designed to independently organize the sites of promoter activity (Grienberg and Benayahu, 2005; Lescot et al., 2002; Pohar et al., 2004; Schmid et al., 2004; Shahmuradov et al., 2003; Zhu and Zhang, 1999), transcription factor binding (Bergman et al., 2005; Kanamori et al., 2004; Kolchanov et al., 2002; Matys et al., 2003) and regulatory variation (Stenson et al., 2003; Tahira et al., 2005; Zhao et al., 2004). Several challenges face the user when accessing these databases for the annotation of biologically validated regulatory regions. For many databases, considerable investigation can be required to collate its information, determine the original experimental techniques used, determine the ‘genomic scope’ of the annotation (i.e. what further annotation is in the vicinity and informative), obtain a sequence of sufficient length to map to new genome sequence assemblies, cross-reference or follow-up on specific annotation or access the annotation programmatically. Furthermore, as new regulatory sequences become characterized each database requires its own curators ad infinitum as few or no mechanisms currently exist in which a community of researchers can add to or comment on these annotations. The Open Regulatory Annotation (ORegAnno) database has been developed to address these issues and provide a unique platform for community annotation of experimentally verified regulatory regions.
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DESCRIPTION OF THE ORegAnno DATABASE |
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TOPABSTRACTINTRODUCTIONDESCRIPTION OF THE ORegAnno...CURRENT CONTENT OF THE...ACCESSCONCLUSIONSREFERENCES |
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ORegAnno permits the open annotation of regulatory regions by providing roles and secure user accounts to contributors. Three roles exist for ORegAnno contributors: user, validator and administrator. A user role enables a contributor to add individual annotations of promoters, transcription factor binding sites and regulatory mutations to the database. As a first step in validating a new annotation's authenticity, each submitted annotation is immediately cross-referenced against PubMed (Wheeler et al., 2005), Entrez Gene (Maglott et al., 2005), dbSNP (Sherry et al., 2001), the NCBI Taxonomy database (Wheeler et al., 2005) and EnsEMBL (Hubbard et al., 2005). Once submitted, the record is added to the database and an email is generated containing an XML representation of this record to members of the ORegAnno developers' mailing-list (oreganno-guts{at}bcgsc.ca). As a second step in validating an annotation's authenticity, a validator role enables a contributor to score individual annotations in the database. Validators will modify an overall score for an annotation based on their ability to confirm the reliability of annotation from literature. Validators have the option of increasing the annotation score by one if they can confirm the record, leaving the score unchanged if their conclusions are indeterminate, or decreasing the score by one if an error has been found. Each observation and score modification of an annotation along with the associated validator user information is stored in ORegAnno. An administrator role enables a contributor to assign roles, add or define evidence (classes, types and subtypes) and batch upload large sets of annotations directly to the database. Both administrator and validator roles allow the modification of records; for a record modification, a new record is created and the old record is marked as being deprecated by the newer record. Each role is further permitted to add comments to individual annotations to improve subsequent users' understanding of a particular annotation. ORegAnno's usage of roles provides a level of accountability in the database as users become owners of their annotation and validators become responsible for verifying an annotation's authenticity.
For each type of annotation that is currently in ORegAnno, the database obeys the following rules:
- Each annotation describes a regulatory property of one target gene which is either user-defined, in Entrez Gene or in EnsEMBL.
- Each annotation must be attributed to a species which has a taxonomy id in the NCBI Taxonomy database.
- Each annotation can optionally be associated to a specific dataset. This functionality allows external curators to manage particular sets of annotation using ORegAnno's curation tools.
- Each annotation specifies an evidence type, subtype and class describing the biological technique cited to discover the regulatory sequence. Evidence classes are broken into two categories: the ‘regulator’ classes describe evidence for the specific protein(s) that bind a site. The ‘regulatory site’ classes describe evidence for the function of a regulatory sequence itself. These two categories are further divided into three levels of regulation (transcription, transcript stability and translation). Thus, a total of six evidence classes currently exist. Evidence types describe the generic assay used while subtypes define specific implementations of these assays (Table 1). Each annotation can have multiple entries from any evidence class, type and subtype describing each piece of experimental evidence for the regulatory sequence and/or binding protein.
- Each piece of experimental evidence is optionally associated to a specific cell type using the eVOC cell type ontology (Kelso et al., 2003).
- Each transcription factor binding site or regulatory mutation must specify a target transcription factor which is either user-defined, in Entrez Gene or in EnsEMBL. If there is no recorded gene target, a classification of ‘unknown’ is specified.
- Each transcription factor binding site or regulatory mutation must include sequence with at least 40 bases of flanking genomic sequence to allow the site to be mapped to any release of an associated genome.
- Where available, any annotation can provide search space information specifying the region that was assayed, not just the regulatory sequence.
- User information is recorded with each annotation.
- Each annotation must reference a valid PubMed article. To reduce the entry of redundant annotations, a warning is issued if an annotation is found with either an existing reference identifier or matching genomic sequence.
- For regulatory mutations, each variant that has been proven to cause a change in gene expression is a separate record. The sequences containing both the wild-type and mutant sequences must be specified. If available, a dbSNP cross-reference can also be specified. The type of variant is specified as either being germline, somatic or artificial.
- Each record is associated to a positive, neutral or negative outcome based on the experimental results from the primary reference. For instance, a sequence that was demonstrated not to bind a particular transcription factor could be annotated as a negative outcome; however, to be meaningful, the associated evidence must provide adequate information to determine the conditions assayed.
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ORegAnno comes equipped with analysis tools to assist in annotation of new records. In many cases, extracting genome sequence from literature and identifying the corresponding sequences in genome databases is problematic (Frith et al., 2004). ORegAnno provides the tools ENSSCAN for finding one or more specific sequences within distances relative to the start of an EnsEMBL transcript, ENSFETCH for retrieving small sequences within distances relative to the start of an EnsEMBL transcript (i.e. from –34 to –40 of the transcription start site), NCBISCAN for finding one or more specific sequences within defined distances of a GenBank-reference sequence and NCBIFETCH for highlighting small (gapped) sequences within a GenBank-reference sequence.
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CURRENT CONTENT OF THE ORegAnno DATABASE |
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TOPABSTRACTINTRODUCTIONDESCRIPTION OF THE ORegAnno...CURRENT CONTENT OF THE...ACCESSCONCLUSIONSREFERENCES |
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At time of writing, the ORegAnno database housed a total of 2691 entries from over 20 users. These include 780 regulatory regions, 1804 transcription factor binding sites, and 107 regulatory mutations (polymorphisms and haplotypes) from 9 species (Table 2). A large fraction of these sites were obtained from previous large-scale collections such as the FlyReg resource (Bergman et al., 2005) and a large set of muscle/liver-specific regulatory sites curated by Wasserman and co-workers (Ho Sui et al., 2005; Wasserman and Fickett, 1998). Eleven regulatory polymorphism records were obtained from rSNP_DB (Ponomarenko et al., 2001); rSNP_DB records were filtered to include only those records which pertained to natural mutations or polymorphisms. In addition, over 200 new annotations were obtained by manual curation of literature. Thus, the ORegAnno resource represents an assembly of existing records, a significant addition of new records and provides an open-access system for continued, community-based accumulation of sites within a standardized framework.
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ACCESS |
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TOPABSTRACTINTRODUCTIONDESCRIPTION OF THE ORegAnno...CURRENT CONTENT OF THE...ACCESSCONCLUSIONSREFERENCES |
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The raw ORegAnno data are available directly over MySQL from db01.bcgsc.ca or through web services (Booth, 2004). Methods are exported using Web services to search for annotation by various fields enabling fetches by such fields as stable id, species, gene name, transcription factor name or cross-reference sources. ORegAnno also automatically maps each annotation to its relevant genome using Blast (Altschul et al., 1990); these mappings are viewable through the UCSC Genome Browser (Kent et al., 2002) or EnsEMBL using the Distributed Annotation System (Dowell et al., 2001). Finally, the entire database is converted to XML format and made available on the website daily. The ORegAnno web application is open-source under the Lesser GNU Public Licence thereby permitting all forms of modification and mirroring.
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CONCLUSIONS |
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TOPABSTRACTINTRODUCTIONDESCRIPTION OF THE ORegAnno...CURRENT CONTENT OF THE...ACCESSCONCLUSIONSREFERENCES |
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The ORegAnno resource represents the first open-access, community-based forum for annotation of regulatory sequences. ORegAnno is currently the largest collection of functionally validated regulatory annotations available with unrestricted access. To our knowledge, it is the first resource to incorporate regulatory regions, binding sites and variation into a single resource. It is also the first system to incorporate a structured system for experimental evidence and allow both negative and positive results. The requirements for sufficient flanking sequence and verified gene identifiers (Ensembl or Entrez) ensure maximum compatibility with the community's various research needs, both currently and in the future. The intention of ORegAnno is not to replace any regulatory element databases. Many of the well-targeted databases have domain- or species-specific information that would be impractical to incorporate into a single resource. Instead, we hope to create a single multi-species database and curation system for some of the most essential information (target gene, binding protein, binding site sequence, etc.). Thus, we believe ORegAnno should exist in collaboration with the more specific databases as a central warehouse of data, with the ultimate goal of incorporating all experimentally verified regulatory annotation. We anticipate that this growing library of regulatory elements will prove an important resource for the validation of computational methods of motif detection, investigations of regulatory element evolution and an essential resource for the appraisal and validation of genome-wide regulatory predictions (Robertson et al., 2006; Xie et al., 2005).
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Acknowledgments |
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We would like to acknowledge the Wasserman lab (http://www.cisreg.ca/tjkwon/) and James Fickett (http://www.cbil.upenn.edu/MTIR/HomePage.html) for generously making their regulatory element catalogues publicly available. We thank the ORegAnno users for their continuing efforts to improve this resource through manual curation and record validation. We gratefully acknowledge funding from Genome Canada, Genome British Columbia and the BC Cancer Foundation. S.B.M. was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (MSFHR). O.L.G. was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), NSERC and MSFHR. E.D.P. was supported by CIHR. M.C.S. and S.J.M.J. were supported by MSFHR.Funding to pay the Open Access publication charges for this article was provided by Genome Canada.
Conflict of Interest: none declared.
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FOOTNOTES |
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The authors wish it to be known that, in their opinion, the first two authors should be regarded as joint First Authors.
Associate Editor: Nikolaus Rajewsky 
Received on October 25, 2005; revised on December 22, 2005; accepted on December 23, 2005
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