This sug gests that participating systems left out some sources of gene identifiers. The same article explicitly states Arabidopsis in the title. Coupled with the nomencla ture convention of preceding homologues with the initials of the genus and so species, a simple heuristic should eliminate some false negatives. Allow for non species specific gene mentions when the author generalizes across species The molecular target of thalidomide, a severely terato genic therapeutic compound, was recently discovered to be the cereblon protein using biochemical approaches. To demonstrate the role of cereblon in develop ment, the authors used zebrafish, chick and mouse sys tems to assemble compelling evidence for how thalidomide administration to pregnant women could have caused the severe limb deformities witnessed in the 1960s, an experiment that is otherwise unethical in human systems.

The authors concluding sentence in the abstract deliberately excludes species references to generalize their findings in lieu of a defini tive experiment. A curation system that can aid the cap ture of these findings might look to the Protein Ontology or the Clusters of Orthologous Groups database as an alternative to species non specific database identifiers. Show a record of changes and allow for reversing decisions If a curator works through a set of proposed gene men tions during article curation, the ability to tell which suggestions were accepted outright, which ones were changed, and which ones have not yet been evaluated relieves the curator from recalling each decision, espe cially if curation takes place over a matter of hours or days.

This suggestion is the direct result of a feature from the GNSuite system. Recommendations for the Interactive Task challenge The demonstration task and ensuing discussion not only highlighted some of the curation challenges, they also helped to crystallize how an interactive task can be run as a challenge in BioCreative IV. The aim of this section is two fold, to make specific recommendations for how the challenge should be run, and to identify critical topics overlooked in the demonstration task and gather the necessary expertise to refine the IAT design. Pair developers Dacomitinib with curators throughout the process The workshop session where developers showcased their systems to curators elicited feedback that could have been rapidly integrated into the systems to improve their performance. Since the software engineers working on these tools generally do not have biological knowl edge, it can be difficult for them to know features in which to invest effort. Clearly, some guidance based on curation expertise earlier in the process should lead to better results.