Integrated Bioinformatics Application for Automated Target Discovery

In this article we present an in silico method that automatically assigns putative functions to DNA sequences. The annotations are at an increasingly conceptual level, up to identifying general biomedical fields to which the sequences could contribute. This bioinformatics datamining system makes substantial use of several resources: a locally stored MEDLINE® database; a manually built classification system; the MeSH® taxonomy; relational technology; and bioinformatics methods. Knowledge is generated from various data sources by using well-defined semantics, and by exploiting direct links between them. A two-dimensional “Concept Map™” displays the knowledge graph, which allows causal connections to be followed. The use of this method has been valuable and has saved considerable time in our in-house projects, and can be generally exploited for any sequence-annotation or knowledgecondensation task.